DocuWeeks at the IFC Center: AUGUST 12th - SEPTEMBER 1st

15th Annual DocuWeeks is here! Don't miss out on Better This World, The Boy Mir, Darwin, Miss Representation, Unfinished Spaces, and the NY Shorts Program: The Barber of Birmingham, Maya Deren's Sink, The Home Front. Filmmakers available for Q&A at many evening screenings. Details on all DocuWeeks films and full schedule available at docuweeks.com. Get the latest news about DocuWeeks™ films and filmmakers at twitter.com/docuweeks and facebook.com/docuweeks

Plan your DocuWeeks screenings with the FilmFest DocuWeeks iPhone App! More info: http://filmfest.me/apps/docuweeks/

Our goal is to reach 150 likes on Facebook and 150 followers on Twitter by the end of the day. If you like DocuWeeks on Facebook or follow DocuWeeks on Twitter, you will be entered in a drawing for 2 complimentary vouchers to the DocuWeeks 2011 LA or NY screening of your choice. Contest ends Thursday, July 28 at 11:59pm PT.

The Los Angeles Film Festival returned to its downtown digs last month, with its parent company, Film Independent, in a bit of a flux with the departure of its longtime executive director, Dawn Hudson, for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. But with Rebecca Yeldham and David Ansen helming the festival once again, Angelinos had much cinematic food for thought amid a very crowded month of festivals. To the east there was SilverDocs, Human Rights Watch Festival and Shefield Doc/Fest, and to the north, Frameline and Banff World Media Festival. In addition, there were high-profile openings for Buck and Page One, and cable premieres of Hot Coffee and Sex Crimes Unit.

The LAFF programmers proliferated the documentaries fairly liberally across the strands, affording the attendee a compelling mix of festival circuit hits and world premieres. Given the LA demographic, there was an ample selection of Latino cinema. The "Documenting Mexico" strand featured Natalia Almada's latest, El Velador (The Night Watchman), in which we experience the tragic repercussions of the ongoing drug wars obliquely, through the eyes of a cemetery caretaker, who oversees the graves and mausoleums of countless victims-drug lords, cops and innocent bystanders. He doesn't say much, and the cemetery itself makes for a fragile sanctuary from the cataclysmic world outside that has claimed so many. Almada affords us a subtle sociocultural context through the news reports coming from car radios and the watchman's small television that keep him company, but El Velador is neither a journalistic exposé, nor a social issue documentary. Through its quietly intense lyricism and its literary power, one gets a sense of both the contemplative world of the night shift and the foreboding one that emerges with the sunrise.

The festival also spotlighted Cuba--its cinema and its story. Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murrary's Unfinished Spaces deftly turns the tale of a work of architecture-the Cuban National Arts Schools-into an allegory about the Cuban revolution and its complicated history of loyalty and disillusionment. In the early years of the revolution, Fidel Castro enlisted the services of three of Cuba's greatest architects to create a cluster of schools that would celebrate creativity and artistry. But within a few years, ideological purity took hold, and the very idea behind the schools was dismissed as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary. The buildings went to seed and the architects either fled the country or resigned themselves to a fate of pre-fab, Soviet-style structures. In the end, though, with Castro on the wane and post-Cold War reality setting in, passion for the Schools is rekindled and the original architects, now in their 80s, are invited to revive what they had started 50 years ago.

Pre-revolutionary Cuba was a haven for American expats who yearned a more idyllic, affordable life. Those same yearnings inform a recent generation  of retirees, who discovered the charm and beauty of post-Noriega Panama and quietly moved south. Maybe not so quietly, since as Anayansi Prado's Paraiso for Sale bears out, where pioneers step in, developers are sure to follow--and natives are sure to be uprooted in the name of progress. Following three characters impacted by this upheaval in different ways, Prado weaves a rich narrative, lending a fresh, ground-level view of an age-old saga of corporate encroachment and grassroots resistance.

The impact of US encroachment lingers in many bad ways, in countries like Iraq, but David Fine intentionally soft-pedals political discussion in his charming film Salaam Dunk, which profiles a year in the life of a women's basketball team at the American University of Iraq in Kurdistan. In a war-torn nation in which women have little stature, basketball is an empowering force for these students. Through the game, they discover teamwork and camaraderie--and most of all a respect for ethnic and cultural differences. Fine had also given the women cameras to record video diaries, which reveals a few sobering realities--namely, Kurdistan is worlds away from the rest of Iraq in terms of progress, and many of the women are afraid to reveal to even their families that they're attending an American school. While such an ideal outcome in cultural diplomacy would not have been possible anywhere else in Iraq, the filmmaker, by focusing on the characters and how they evolve through a basketball season, offers us a glimpse of hope in the wake of a long, ill-conceived and ill-executed war.

The second  most popular spectator sport in America is not basketball, but auto racing. While Formula One racing is not the same as NASCAR, it provides the same thrills, chills and spills. One of Formula One's brightest stars was Brazil's Aryrton Senna, the subject of Asif Kapadia's epic biography, Senna. Kapadia  and his team managed to turn thousands of hours of archival footage and audio interviews and a sweeping score into a cinematic tour de force that embraces the essentials of great storytelling--character, conflict, plot, foreshadowing , denouement and--spoiler alert--a tragic ending. As Kapadia related in the post-screening Q&A, Hollywood directors such as Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood had all expressed interest in taking on Senna's story, but bowed out. Kapadia and his team spent three years editing the film, shaping 15,000 hours of footage into a riveting, turbo-charged 104-minute drama.

Renée, from director/.producer/writer Eric Drath, is a different sort of sports story, profiling Renée Richards, the 1970s tennis star, the discovery of whose former life as surgeon and family man Richard Raskind would cause an uproar among players and sports pundits alike. Now in her 70s, and still a practicing surgeon, Richards reflects on the trauma of her transformation and its repercussions: alienation within the tennis world, estrangement from her ex-wife and troubled son, struggles with her reluctant status as a role model for the transgender community and her desire to live a quiet, nearly monastic life. Classmates, relatives and colleagues from both the tennis world and the medical profession weigh in with their side of the story and their admiration for Richards' courage. The film could have stood a little more presence from the LGBT community, given Richards' high profile as a transgendered person in a much less tolerant time, and a lot less presence from the filmmaker, who made himself part of the story through his voiceover and through his awkward appearances on camera. Not necessary.

For country singer Chely Wright, coming out  to the conservative, God-fearing, flag-waving world that gave her a Grammy-winning career was a wrenching but liberating experience. Filmmakers Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf were there to document Wright's long, painful process leading up to her public announcement, filming her conversations with her spiritual advisor, her sister, her friends and her colleagues in Nashville--the mecca of the country music community. But it's Wright's video diaries, which she had started recording long before she had met the filmmakers, contrasted with her music videos and talk show appearances that give the film its richly textured study of private anguish over public persona. Wish Me Away earned the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Feature "for its honesty, humor and potential to changes minds and even save lives."

Thomas White is editor of Documentary.

What happens to the narrative DNA of a movie once it's in your mind? Does it get decoded? Does it get cloned in the stories you tell? Or in the narrative structure of your own life story?

If you were engineering the marketing for Errol Morris' new documentary--or "anti-documentary," as he calls it--Tabloid, you might, not unlike the film's star, Joyce McKinney, once did, think that you were living a fairy tale in light of the media climate these days: The scandal-fueled death of 168-year-old British tabloid giant News of the World is making international headlines, while a recent Newsweek cover has declared this "The Mormon Moment." And to top it off, McKinney herself has found a new obsession: Tabloid. On a crusade to vindicate herself, she has flown to every festival she can and has called whoever might have interest; she sits in the audience shouting "LIAR!" at the screen, then announcing herself to the crowd at the most dramatic moment she can once the lights come up, as she recently told The New York Times.

The elements of the story are simple enough: In the 1970s, McKinney, a beauty queen with a 168 IQ, falls for Kirk Anderson, a Mormon with a Corvette. He soon vanishes from her life, seemingly to be "called on a mission" for the Church. And it's there that McKinney is called on a mission of her own, hiring a private detective to track down Anderson in England, flying there with a few cohorts to help track him down, abducting him away to a cottage and holding him as an eventually willing hostage for three days of sex. She becomes a cause célèbre-standing trial for kidnapping and rape while at the same time becoming the celebrated cover girl of a major British tabloid showdown: one portraying her as a saint, the other as a slut. From there, Joyce McKinney's story only gets more wildly unpredictable.

No one writing about Tabloid can seem to help themselves from indulging in the sensationalism of mentioning such things as a beauty queen, kidnapping, shackling a Mormon, rape, burning magic underwear, becoming a god with a planet, a wig called "Matilda," a marshmallow shoved into a parking meter, nun costumes, prostitution, bondage, S & M, the term "spreadeagled" and, of course, the cloning of a dog named Booger. Writers also tend to mention Rashomon, understandably, because the truth of what happened, whether in "the love cottage" or the media spotlight, remains prismatically elusive.

Documentary recently waxed philosophical with Morris about the strange terrains of Joyce McKinney, delusion, narrative and identity, in the context of this outlandish tabloid tale.

Documentary: In a YouTube video of your Q & A for Tabloid at DOC NYC last fall, Joyce McKinney shouts out from the audience, then comes down and tells her reaction to the film --

Errol Morris: I invited her up on stage.

D: And you said, "This is what I always wanted." Can you elaborate on that?

EM: I never really wanted to exclude her from any of this. After all, it's a movie about her. Even if she doesn't like the movie or doesn't agree with a lot of the material, it's still a movie about her--and, dare I say it, what I consider to be a loving portrait of her. I like Joyce McKinney. And I think the movie at least captures a good part of her story. I suppose if she had been making the movie, she wouldn't have put any character in other than Joyce. She said, I believe on one occasion, that she was very disappointed that I used anyone else.

And she would have liked the movie to be an attack on the LDS Church. Well, I didn't want to do that. I believe Joyce in this respect: She was treated badly by the Church. But what role she played in it versus what role Kirk Anderson played in it, versus what role the Church played in it--I don't know, but I don't think the Church is completely innocent with respect to the demise of that love affair.

D: Do you think that Joyce McKinney appreciates and relishes the absurdity of her life experience, or is it more of a victim perspective?

EM: I'm not sure I can answer it because I think it's a combination of both. Joyce certainly sees herself as a victim, and she may very well be in some respect. But to me she seems in many ways a victim of herself and her own obsession. I admire her for her obsessions. After all, I like to think of myself as an obsessed person. But obsessions can lead you into some dark rabbit holes, and if you're really unlucky, unlike Alice, you never re-emerge.

When someone tells me, "Joyce is so crazy," I point out, "Well, no crazier than the men running around in this story in pursuit of Joyce." No crazier maybe than myself for making a movie about all of it. I'm willing to put myself in with the rest.

And Joyce is a person who spun a tale. The most powerful material [I had] was that strange film made by Trent Harris in the early 1980s of Joyce reading from her then-and-still unfinished novel [entitled Once Upon a Time, "a very special love story about how I met Kirk," Joyce says]. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

D: Before you became a filmmaker, you were a frustrated writer as well?

EM:  I certainly really identify with Joyce with respect to all that. I had trouble finishing what I was writing. I believe I made documentaries in part because of my enormous difficulties in writing. My stepfather, who really supported me over the years, desperately wanted me to write a book on The Thin Blue Line...and I couldn't do it. He actually wrote part of a book to show me how easy it might be. (laughs)

D: There's a documentary that came out about nine years ago called Stone Reader. In it, the filmmaker goes looking for the author of a lost masterpiece, his only novel, who himself has dropped off the radar, so to speak. After a long hunt he finds the writer living with his mother. Writing the novel decades before had exhausted him so thoroughly that he could never recover. He could passionately talk about his love of literature. He could comically appreciate the absurdity of his situation. But no matter how much he wished things were different, he couldn't recover. I couldn't help thinking about that with respect to Joyce McKinney. She kind of wrote this absurdist novel with her life.

EM: That's an excellent way to describe it.

D: Thinking about it like that made me more compassionate toward Joyce.

EM:  I like her. I feel more than compassionate that she's a true romantic, a dreamer.

D: And an adventurer.

EM: An absurd adventurer. I mean, the whole idea of putting together that group of men to go across the Atlantic and find Kirk Anderson is one of the truly amazing stories.

D: It's like she's offered a chance to invent this story, to take the stage--as if Joseph Campbell were looking at it. She finally has this challenge to rise to, at least in her own mind, a cause to call on her best resources. It's an epic adventure that, to hear her tell it, no one has properly understood or appreciated.

EM: I remember early on that someone said they thought this was a slight story, and I was surprised. If the issue is that it lacks the gravitas of the Cuban Missile Crisis-- McNamara waggling his finger and saying, "It's luck" that kept us from a nuclear apocalypse-then, yes, it's not that. I hadn't thought of it before you just mentioned it, but I agree: Whether it's a Joseph Campbell-like quest, or it's one more version of the hero with a thousand faces. It is a quest, a journey.

D: This seemed like a relatively linear film as it was unfolding, but what resulted in my mind after I watched it, was anything but linear. I have a sense of the relative order of who was where when, but in terms of what happened it still could have gone any number of ways. Above all, I was pretty convinced that no matter how many people who were involved talked about it, it wasn't going to get any clearer.

EM: I think that's a really pertinent and good observation. An interesting phenomenon fascinates me. Take The Thin Blue Line. As I spent two-and-a-half years investigating that case, there was a feeling of things falling into place. But there are other cases where you don't have that feeling of convergence; you have the feeling that there's never going to be any closure.

Something about documentaries became really clear to me in making this particular film: What makes documentary interesting to me is the fact that you don't know where you're going. You're at the mercy of the investigation, if anything. And I'm like Joyce; it's habit-forming. You get obsessed and you can't give it up. But there is something in this art form that can't be found elsewhere: the act of discovery, of coming up with something that you never could have constructed yourself.

D: The last time we spoke, you mentioned your keen awareness of objective truth versus narrative. Your personality and interests seem to permeate your films, but there is also this consistent theme of how you're organically arriving at the structure and even the substance of your movies. I don't see how you could explore and deconstruct that conflict except in what we call documentaries.

EM: Yes. I'm as excited as ever by documentary. It's a pure art form. And a lot of the issues that--I think you described it really, really well--a lot of the issues that obsess me, I don't know how else to describe it, really can't be addressed except in documentary. I will continue making them because I kind of love the medium. I don't know what I'd do without it.

D: And your subjects are often wrestling with that same thing in their own mind in terms of their personal narrative versus what's outside their mind --

EM: We all are. We all live in delusional worlds. Some of us more than others, but none of us live completely in reality. I'm not sure I would even know what that means. We construct a picture of the world for ourselves that may be at complete variance with reality. Call it the human condition.

My favorite line in the whole movie would be a toss-up between Joyce's "marshmallow in the parking meter'" argument for why she didn't rape Kirk Anderson and [journalist] Peter Torre's line that "I think it was ropes, but 'chains' sounds better." It captures the essence of the story: that we are constantly reconfiguring stories to make them pleasing or acceptable to ourselves.

Tabloid opens July 15 through Sundance Selects/IFC Films.

Taylor Segrest is a writer and filmmaker, and most recently wrote and co-produced the feature-length documentary Darwin (2011).

The eighth annual Games for Change symposium, conducted in New York City, June 20-22 at New York University's Skirball Center, showcased the major players and initiatives of the emerging social impact gaming movement. An authentic and functional execution of media convergence, social impact gaming fuses gaming, online interactivity and social media to achieve positive real world outcomes; so naturally, Games for Change included a keynote address from former US Vice President Al Gore. Asi Burak, creator of the groundbreaking game Peacemaker and co-president of Games for Change with Michelle Byrd, maintains,  "Featuring Vice President Al Gore as the festival's keynote set the tone that games are mainstream and that games for social change and learning make all the sense in the world." Gore clearly concurred, observing that "People need play, and the potential of gaming combined with social interchange media is huge. The question is, Can games change unsatisfying reality?"

Convergence has been a much overused word, with many unfulfilled promises, since the 1980s. Transmedia, however, is truly a convergence new media end-product and process, involving cross-platform content, interactivity (most commonly the Internet), multiple digital arms, and genuine symbiosis among the platforms. "Transmedia in the social change space is highly promising but still in its early stages," Burak notes. "It is much more than a buzz and has proved successful in entertainment. But it demands careful planning and creative execution. The two things that make a transmedia, or cross-media, project work well are genuine collaboration between talents across disciplines with one group or an individual executive -producing; and deep thinking on how the components interact with each other, how they complement and how they enable reaching broader audiences."

So how does the serious gaming world relate to documentary filmmakers, and why should Games for Change be of interest to them?  For one thing, Michelle Byrd ran the Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP ) for years and knows documentary inside and out--particularly the incubation process that is integral to her approach at Games for Change. Secondly, the co-founder of the organization, Suzanne Seggerman (who received a special achievement award this year for increasing attendance at the conference from 40 in 2004 to over 800 now) began her career in documentary, having worked on Ken Burns' award-winning PBS series The West. In addition Games for Change sports the IDA, the Tribeca Film Institute and SXSW as institutional partners. The Advisory Board includes Tracy Fullerton, professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts, and Carla Mertes, director of the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Program, and the organization has attracted major support from the AMD Foundation, the  John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Specifically related to documentary, this year's Transmedia Award went to Inside the Haiti Earthquake, from director Katie McKenna and her team at PTV Productions, Inc., which incorporates documentary footage in its game. Two of the projects that were featured in The Demo Spotlight--an opportunity for six project leaders to pitch in front of a panel of world experts--were based on original documentary projects. Climbing Sacred Mountain,from Michella Rivera-Gravage and Sapana Sakya of the Center for Asian American Media, is based on Sakya and Ramyata Limbu's  documentary Daughters of Everest.   SOS_SLAVES is a component of the transmedia project Sands of Silence: A Personal Journey into the Trafficking of Women, produced by Chelo Alvarez-Stehle and her team, and funded by Latino Public Broadcasting.

Burak describes The Demo Spotlight as, "a successful session that was modeled after similar events in the documentary space. Michelle and I looked closely at Hot Docs, The Good Pitch and other formats. We really liked the transparency of the process, and the professional way in which the conversation between the creators, funders and mentors was managed."

Alvarez-Stehle relates that the Games for Change experience proved extremely beneficial to her: "A major game developer came up to me right after my pitch and I made numerous useful contacts. I believe that game-makers can do amazing things with a filmmaker's footage because of their uniquely different mindset and the movement to make games for good use offers limitless possibilities." Mason Funk, a Los Angeles-based documentary filmmaker, says that he came to Games for Change primarily to solicit business for his company, Channel Road Films, and successfully generated a number of leads.

 From SOS_SLAVES, which Chelo Alvarez-Stehle and her team demonstrated at Games for Change. Illustration: Ian Peter Hosfeld

Through its production unit, Games for Change is currently working on projects that should be of interest to documentarians. According to Burak,  "This includes Half the Sky, based on Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's bestselling book about women's oppression and empowerment--the most ambitious transmedia project outside of the commercial space. We are responsible for the game components--a global Facebook game to raise awareness and drive real-world action, and mobile games in India and Africa targeted at women and girls in remote communities. This project could also show the way for others on how to build a strong collaboration between filmmakers and game developers."

Games for Change's commitment to documentary extends to its own events; the organization commissioned Cory Wilson of The Collaborative to create nine short documentaries about the symposium as it was happening, and he is in post-production on a more comprehensive piece about Games for Change. Notes Wilson, "It was an amazing event, with some of the most intelligent, dedicated and forward-thinking people you can find, from Michelle and Asi to an array of community stakeholders: foundations, developers, designers, organizations and academics." 

One of these stakeholders is the National Endowment for the Arts. According to Alyce Myatt, the director of the Media Arts Division, "We're now accepting applications for games of all types, along with proposals for mobile, Web content, dramatic narrative films as well as documentaries. We convene a peer-review panel comprised of experts in the genres proposed. They use the criteria of ‘artistic excellence' and ‘artistic merit' in deciding which proposals receive funding. The deadline for applications is September 1, 2011.  We held webinars to answer people's questions on June 15  and on July 13.  [The June 15th webinar can be found here.]  For those projects that receive funding, the expectations are not just for a film but also an engagement campaign, which could include a website, NGO partners, a social media strategy, a transmedia strategy and more. In the current noisy media environment, these are all essential activities if a project is to be seen or, in the case of games, played." Regarding the attendees at Games for Change, Myatt expressed the hope that "in the future there are more filmmakers in attendance. Thinking about games requires one to think differently about the presentation of information. It's not for everyone, and I don't believe in the ‘gamification' of everything," but I do think that more filmmakers would find game paradigms as liberating."

 "Social impact gaming is now a mature community and movement that can't be ignored, with bridges to other communities such as independent film and documentaries," Burak maintains. "Moving into social media and games is a great opportunity for documentary filmmakers to reach beyond the ‘converted' and get to audiences that won't watch PBS or pick a documentary on Netflix. At the same time, it's very demanding; it puts filmmakers out of their comfort zone. It also expands the funds needed and forces them to focus on many fronts at once. This could hurt their chances to succeed, and in other cases create a ‘thin' layer of new media over the documentary, one that is not deep enough to support it. I would recommend filmmakers who are looking into games to work closely with game designers who are top experts in their craft."

H. Scott Bayer is the editor/publisher of Indie Film Reporter and writes about independent film, filmmakers and production technology for several trade publications and broader audience newspapers when not working on his own or other peoples' films.

What do Elmo, former gang members, gypsy Romanian school children, bullies, a horse whisperer and crowdsourcing all have in common? They were the big hits at the 9th annual AFI/Discovery Channel SilverDocs Film Festival and Conference in Silver Spring, Maryland, this past June.  

As always, there was far too much to do in one day, or five days; the offerings were so diverse. This year over 100 films from 60 countries were selected from the 2,200 submitted. But, says festival director Sky Sitney, "I would rather have people overscheduled than sitting around for hours." If that was the goal, Sitney and her staff achieved it.

This year the festival and five-day conference attracted 1,200 filmmakers and 30,000 attendees-a 20 percent increase over 2010. This growth was probably helped by all the panels being housed in one location, the newly opened Silver Spring Civic Center. The movies were just down the street. "We made a real conscious effort to get the conference tied in with the festival," says Sitney. "We did not want divided programs."  The strategy paid off. Most attendees liked the new space and proximity.

Among the most popular films were those with education as a theme. Our School (Dirs.: Mona Nicoara, Miruna Coca-Cozma), the Sterling Award winner for Best US feature, follows the story of attempting to integrate three rural gypsy children into the mainstream Romanian school system over four years; the prejudice endures along the way.

The Learning, about natives of the Philippines teaching in the Baltimore school system, also played to packed screenings. The idea for the film was sparked by an article director Ramona Diaz had read in the Baltimore Sun. Their story was inspiring, often humorous and sometimes sad.

Lee Hirsch's The Bully Project, the recipient of a Special Jury Mention Award, was a particularly moving story about children being bullied. Editor Randi Cohen said she was "shocked, educated and impressed with the fortitude of the families, and the chance for the film to make a difference in a number of ways using social media and community activism."

Crime was also a big theme of the festival. Steve James' The Interrupters, about former Chicago gang members trying to keep the peace in their neighborhood, was very popular. And even though some thought it was a bit long at 144 minutes, its power was undeniable. After the screening, filmmaker Pauline Steinhorn walked up to one of the female characters in the lobby and greeted her as if she were an old friend. "We hugged, although we had never met," Steinhorn reflects. "That was the power of the doc: You cared so much about the people."

Joe Bailey Jr. and Steve Mims' Incendiary: The Willingham Case, about a death row execution that perhaps should not have happened, touched people as well. "Although the film was not totally finished because of some events that occurred after the submission deadline, it really was a frightening film because of the influence of the politicians in Texas," observes lawyer/filmmaker Michael Barrett.

A movie about a monster puppet was the big crowd pleaser. Constance Marks' Being Elmo brought puppeteer and Baltimore native Kevin Clash and his family to SilverDocs. "It is such a feel-good, delightful film," exclaims Sitney. The doc also helps exhibit the SilverDocs philosophy, she adds: "No single film can be everything, but we hope the whole festival can be. We can serve our viewers in a variety of ways collectively." Balancing out Elmo included such films as Xu Xin's six-hour Karamay, about a fire in a China school, and Salome Jashi's Bakhmaro, a slow look at a dying town in the nation of Georgia. "We have a responsibility to make sure we create a platform that includes films that are outside of the box, that challenge viewers, too," Sitney maintains.

The five-day conference also proved to be popular, with the themes of panels often reflecting the themes of many of the films at the festival-i.e. presentations on crime docs, or filmmakers appearing in their own films,

The master classes in editing, directing and producing were all big hits. Toby Shimin and Tom Haneke, the respective editors from Buck and Where Soldiers Come From, each brought before and after versions of films they had edited. Haneke was particularly good at giving hints on how to organize hundreds of hours of footage. His biggest piece of advice: Put your comments in your edit file the first time you watch video. "You will never react to the footage the same way again."

The best line from the directing workshop led by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, according to filmmaker Matthew Radcliff: "If we've got nothing to learn, we won't make the film." The pair talked about what it is like to live with a subject for two or three years of filmmaking, and how your original idea might not end up being the story you tell. They also stressed the importance of casting, interviews and the three-act structure.

The "Separated at Birth" panel explored the relationship between journalists and filmmakers who use their work as source material. Steve James and Amir Bar-Lev said that print and film each has a role to play. Both agreed that filmmakers have more hurdles to jump over, as access is key to many stories. Often the print side lays the groundwork and film takes it further, giving it staying power as a story. Sometimes the film then gets more of the credit for telling the story-which prompted James to turn to his long-time print collaborator, Alex Kotlowitz, and ask, "Do you hate me?"

Filmmaker Joe Berlinger's panel about the legal troubles he encountered after making Crude was frightening. Through court decisions, Chevron won the right to see 600 hours of outtakes, and all e-mails and documents for five years. The effect could be chilling to filmmakers, Berlinger told his very attentive audience: his legal bills totaled $1.3 million, and his film was ruled not to be "independent journalism."

If the legal world scared you to death at SilverDocs, another panel on crowdsourcing could make your brain explode. For independent filmmakers the lesson was clear: Not only do you have to produce, write, shoot and raise money, but now you have to do it in a completely different way.

Presenter Jilann Spitzmiller of DocuMentors was fabulous at introducing the idea of fundriaisng via the Internet "Everybody has a niche audience for a film," she said. "It's about finding them on the Web. You have to figure out the universal themes of your film, and then compel people to donate. Communicate your mission." She added one caveat: "People give to people and stories, not causes or issues."

Spitzmuller presented the nuts and bolts of how to do it, and explored websites that worked and didn't work. (Only 44 percent of projects get funded.) Bottom line:  Have plenty of time to devote to the idea of crowdsourcing. It is a long-term marketing and fundraising endeavor. For the uninitiated, the two big crowdsourcing sties are IndieGoGo and Kickstarter. Most people raise modest funds for defined tasks such as shooting, music, etc., but one person did bring in $150,000 via Kickstarter.

When Lauren Cardillo is not cleaning up the mess from her brain exploding, she is a DC-based filmmaker. She is currently developing a series for National Geographic.

Making a feature documentary with 200 collaborators from around the world is no stroll in the park. Nevertheless, producer Ridley Scott and director Kevin Macdonald have done just that via a unique partnership between Scott's Scott Free Films, YouTube and LG Electronics.  

Conceived as a user-generated feature-length documentary, shot on a single day (July 24, 2010), Life in a Day empowers the global community to capture a moment of their lives on camera. The date chosen was a Saturday-a day the producers felt many people could devote more time to the project. Additionally Scott and Macdonald sent 500 small digital cameras to far-flung places around the globe, partnering with Against All Odds Productions, a California-based company that specializes in large-scale global photographic projects-such as the best-selling Day in the Life book series. Participants were invited to shoot on one of the SD cards in the preset camera, send back the card and keep the camera. The producers wanted to try out a melding of YouTube as a social media platform and traditional film formats. Having put out calls for clips on YouTube several times, the team ended up with a staggering amount of material: over 80,000 submissions, totaling 4,500 hours.

Macdonald's concept for the film was inspired by the work of one of his heroes, the British artist and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. Best known for his beautifully poetic documentaries about Britain during the Second World War, Jennings was a major figure in the celebrated British Documentary Film Movement. His colleagues included John Grierson, John Ryerson, Basil Wright, Harry Watt and Alberto Cavalcanti among others. Like many before and during World War II, these filmmakers were deeply concerned about maintaining democracy in the face of the threat from Fascism. Grierson and his colleagues believed filmmaking could play a central role in expanding public knowledge and understanding so citizens could be active on social issues. A particular contribution by Jennings was a movement launched in the 1930s called "Mass Observation," an attempt to document the strangeness and beauty of ordinary lives. Volunteers wrote detailed diaries about their lives, answering questions such as, "What's on your mantelpiece?" and"What graffiti did you see today?" 

"I always want to give an audience something new, something they haven't seen before--and of course experience something new myself," Macdonald writes via e-mail. "It keeps you stimulated as a filmmaker to know you are trying something that might fail--and Life in Day was a risky experiment."  

As all this image material poured in from around the world, a team of researchers and editing assistants, led by veteran feature editor Joe Walker, created a selection process based on several factors, which winnowed down the usable material to about 300 hours. The researchers' job was to tag the clips as they arrived, coding them according to certain themes and finally rating them. According to Walker, one star indicated, "They've spent less thought on filming this than we have logging it"; five stars meant, "Such great characters, stories or footage that it should be in the film, or fire me."

Subsequently, Macdonald and Walker viewed the very best material, while the production team proceeded to retrieve the original footage and the editing team tried to convert it all into one frame rate. The team was keen to receive material that wasn't just about the process of living, that had special happy moments to contribute. They were looking for emotion, disquiet, opinion and exclamation. Walker describes their process as looking for visually "cinematic" kinds of images, given the feature film background that he shared with Macdonald. "We would look for material that went together well, such as all the shots of children where we are behind them and they are looking forward, such as the baby looking out of a window, or the Japanese boy looking out of a train, followed by a mother and daughter on a swing."

Macdonald describes his approach as asking, "What is this material trying to tell me? What are the collective themes and preoccupations that the contributors are pointing me towards?  In other words, I tried to remain as open-minded as I could--not bring too many of my own preconceptions to bear on what I saw." The team found that contributors tended to film either themselves or people known to them, following distinct patterns of a daily routine like waking, washing, walking and eating. These themes were embedded within the flow of the film as a reminder to the viewer that one is traveling throughout a single day on earth. 

Much of the sound in the film was also gathered via You Tube; Scott and Macdonald asked people for material to collage. They could hum or sing a long note, clap hands, breathe in and out, or record a favorite sound. All the music in the film is based on sounds recorded on that day. That process was  managed by veteran composer Matthew Herbert; composer Harry Gregson-Williams came on board much later to help with some of the orchestral writing."When a skydiver falls to earth, for example, you hear a din of everyone's favorite sounds," Walker explains. "This could be kettles boiling, bells ringing, steam trains passing, placed one on top of another as she approaches the ground. The bells that you hear as Okwhan, the Korean cyclist, climbs a temple hill in Katmandu are all recorded by people around the world." 

One of the surprises in seeing the finished film is how good the image and sound quality are on a large screen, given the multiple sources. A huge amount of technical work was done to achieve that consistency.

Engaging features of the structure include several mini-narrative sequences that punctuate the film from time to time, including the Korean cyclist, who is on a 10-year trip around the globe. Another is a sequence in a sumptuous landscape--a New Zealand farm with goats and animal herders that take you through an afternoon's work as the short sequences recur.

Collaging the found image and sound material is a fascinating and central aspect of the film--and works better than the sections scored with orchestral music, which often seems to overwhelm the images. A more engaging sequence involves a trio of African women singing while pounding grain; this scene serves as a recurring motif--sometimes harmonious, sometimes contrapuntal--with other scenes.  To create a sufficient narrative arc, the filmmakers deployed various other strategies--like a very brief and affecting story of a Japanese man and his little son getting up in the morning, making breakfast and praying before the shrine of their dead wife and mother.

Life in a Day, distributed by National Geographic Entertainment, opened June 9 in Germany and June 17 in the UK. It premieres in the US on July 24--a year to the day after the documentary was shot around the world. The film will also enjoy a very long life online as the thousands of hours of footage not in the final cut have been made available on YouTube's channel for the project. The ultimate tribute is the establishment of a separate online TV channel, www.lifeinaday.tv, a nonprofit, community-generated film festival where people all over the globe can interact with the filmmakers, comment on their stories, upload their own clips and even make their own film diaries.

Wanda Bershen is a consultant on fundraising, festivals and distribution. Documentary clients have included Sonia, Power Trip, Afghan Women, Trembling Before G*D, Blacks & Jews. She has organized programs with the Human Rights Film Festival, Brooklyn Museum and Film Society of Lincoln Center and currently teaches arts management at CUNY Baruch. Visit www.reddiaper.com.

To get a sense of just how intensive and comprehensive the Sheffield Doc/Fest has become, take a look at a single time slot.

At 5:00 p.m. on Friday, right in the middle of the five-day festival, you had your choice of no fewer than 13 options of where to turn your attention. You could be in a hub of the Sheffield Hallam University student union, taking a critical look at the inevitably complicated relationship between filmmakers and charities when they partner to make films. In a former chapel up the road, you could witness that same relationship up close, in the Wellcome Trust Broadcast Development Award Pitch, where awards of up to £10,000 were granted for science-based program ideas. Or you could be at Sheffield's famous Crucible Theatre, watching a panel of experts debate about how risk aversion is killing creativity in the UK television industry. At another historic theater next door, you could be discussing how small indies can get noticed in the age of the super indie. Or in Sheffield's grand Town Hall, you could be witnessing a nail-biting, hypothetical scenario involving rights development.

Of course, you could eschew all of the intensive debates and simply enjoy the festival for its stunning film program. And at 5:00 p.m., six films screened simultaneously, all in the presence of their respective filmmakers. Three had their world premieres at Sheffield: Emily James' Just Do it, an insider perspective of a year in the lives of climate campaigners; At Night I Fly, Michel Wenzer's meditative look at maximum-security inmates engaged in a writing program; and Dominic Allan's Calvet, about a Central American artist's dark past. In addition to those six features (and a number of shorts that preceded them), you could attend 10 x 10, a popular filmmaking workshop run by the Documentary Filmmakers Group, in which filmmakers screen 10 minutes of a work-in-progress and receive 10 minutes of feedback.

Having written the festival's film program, I had seen most of the offerings prior to opening day.  At Doc/Fest I spent a lot of time sneaking into the backs of cinemas to listen in on Q & As for some of my favorite films. My own 5:oo p.m. Friday choice was watching BBC Storyville editor Nick Fraser discuss the engrossing and memorable Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. Director Alex Gibney related to delegates how the film had grossed $1.4 million on US VOD alone prior to the theatrical release.

For hundreds of decision-makers and broadcasters, though, their answer to the choice of 13 events at 5:00 pm on Friday was "None of the Above." They were, after all, attending the Doc/Fest MeetMarket, which places filmmakers in one-to-one meetings with mentors, decision-makers and advocates; some projects had dozens of meetings during the two-day event. The MeetMarket has proven to be hugely popular by bypassing the often humiliating drama of the public pitch in favor of tailored match-making; this year, 64 projects from over 20 countries were selected from 486 applications.

In the 15 years I've been attending Doc/Fest (In addition to writing the film catalogue, I serve on the Advisory Committee.), I've seen it grow from a toddler to an adult very much in its prime. As it has spilled over from the intimate setting of the Sheffield Showroom to venues throughout the city, it has evolved from an event centered almost exclusively on the UK television industry to a celebration of documentaries across media and boundaries. Its change in focus is most evident in two related areas: the new media revolution, and the opening up of new platforms for distribution.

Anyone wanting a crash course in how media innovations are changing the documentary form could spend five intensive days exploring the subject at Doc/Fest, which tellingly now bills itself as "The UK's most important documentary and digital media festival." The festival's annual Crossover Summit on Wednesday gets the transmedia ball rolling; this year's summit focused on  how to commission for convergence across platforms, and how to transform the audience from passive viewers to active participants. These themes echoed throughout the festival: On Saturday I saw a truly remarkable demonstration by photojournalist Danfung Dennis (whose debut feature, Hell and Back Again,  had its EU premiere at Doc/Fest). He modeled the technology he has developed behind an online project, also at Doc/Fest, called Condition One, in which, using a laptop, viewers can manipulate their view of a documentary scene (in this case, in a volatile war setting) some 210 degrees. It really seemed like a glimpse into the near future; it was just one of many such glimpses at the festival.

The other major theme was the exploration of distribution and funding pathways outside of the UK television commissioning structure. Saturday saw a Crowdfunding Day, examining the hottest new funding trend of soliciting friends, acquaintances and interested bystanders online. While it might seem a desperate move for many who balk at the notion of holding out a virtual cap in hand, the success of some crowdfunding efforts was in very much in evidence at Doc/Fest, with a clutch of the festival's films, including Just Do It and Sound It Out, having gone the crowdfunding route.

Despite its steady gaze into the future, Doc/Fest still heralds the documentary old guard. This year's most celebrated guest was none other than Albert Maysles, who clearly enjoyed receiving a a lifetime achievement award, giving a master class and participating in a Grey Gardens parade to a new outdoor screening venue. Other doc veterans in attendance included Steve James (who took the Grand Jury Prize for his riveting redemption film The Interrupters); Nick Broomfield, who received The Sheffield Inspiration award; Molly Dineen; and Morgan Spurlock.

If there's a criticism to make about the festival, it's sometimes too much of a good thing. With so many concurrent sessions, films and networking events, some events were sparsely attended, most notably film screenings. A shame, because the film program this year was undeniably a triumph, with festival circuit heavy-hitters such as Position Among the Stars and Bombay Beach running alongside many lower profile but equally powerful films such as Brian Mason's dance biopic Life in Movement. Putting together one of the festival's strongest programs in its history was no small triumph for programmer Hussain Currimbhoy, who also managed to do it in seven months, as the festival moved from November to its new June slot.

The 2012 Sheffield Doc/Fest will run from June 13 through 17.

Carol Nahra is an American documentary producer, writer and media studies lecturer based in London. carolnahra@gmail.com