Ten years since it was founded to revitalize the Lower Manhattan area after 9/11, the Tribeca Film Festival expanded into Midtown-and broadened its programming accordingly. This year's lineup, with films from 32 countries, featured 45 world premieres, 91 features and more than 40 documentaries works. The project of seeing half of the documentaries was an exhausting feat unto itself.

My trial began in earnest on the second day of the festival, while I was subsisting on Cliff Bars waiting for a documentary about the greatest sushi on earth.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a strong debut from director/cinematographer David Gelb, portrays the life and work of 85-year-old sushi master Jiro Ono. The film examines Jiro's work ethic, its results and the challenges it would present for future generations. Lusciously shot on DSLRs and the Red One, the film beholds sushi with the same respect as its creator. In the end, Jiro Dreams of Sushi is about "larger life themes," as Gelb put it in the Q & A--the quest for meaning, the importance of family, the decline of natural resources. "It's not culture-specific," said Gelb. "The humanism of the film is universal. And in that way we're happy when people tell us, 'I don't like sushi, but I still like the movie.'"

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, by Marie Losier, grapples with themes of identity through an atypical love story. The film explores the relationship between performance artist Genesis P-Orridge and his lover, Lady Jaye. In a definitive case of life imitating art, the two underwent a series of plastic surgeries to more closely resemble one another. The idea sprang from a shared notion of the body as a "prison." For a film about the mutability of the self, Ballad is an appropriately mutable film. A mash-up of disparate audio and music recordings, handheld 16mm footage and performative montages, the film exhibits a spontaneity that channels the energy of its subjects.

Social issue documentaries prevailed at this year's festival, examining everything from class to race, gender to religion. Because most of the films took a microcosmic approach to their subject matter, their status as "issue" films wasn't always so obvious.

Greg Barker's Koran by Heart covers an annual Koran reciting competition held in Cairo, Egypt, Following three children between the ages of 7 and 14-- all able to recite the Koran without speaking Arabic--the film explores the pressures of the next generation of Muslims to determine the future of their religion. Barker, whose experience in journalism informed his experience making the film, explained in an interview, "I have been intrigued for a number of years with the internal discussion within Islam over the direction the religion should take, between more fundamentalist-conservative viewpoint and a viewpoint that is more accepting of modernity. I really wanted to get beneath the surface of the competition and the kids' stories to try to somehow get into that."

The festival was also heavy with ESPN films, with most of the buzz surrounding Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney's Catching Hell. Part of ESPN's Thirty for Thirty series, his film explores the terrifying phenomenon of fan scapegoating as it manifested itself in the 2003 National League Championship Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Florida Marlins. After diehard Cubs fan Steve Bartman diverted a foul ball from outfielder Moisés Alou's grasp, he became the object of hatred for a stadium of Cubs fans and, eventually, the greater Chicago area. The reaction was so severe that Bartman eventually had to go off the map.

"I think that ESPN is always looking for these stories that are about something deeply human," Gibney remarked, about working with the sports cable channel. "It's not about the pure sports freak. And I think at their essence, that's what great sports stories are all about."

The presence of the filmmakers before and after the screenings added considerable heft to each film. This was especially the case for Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon Semper Fi: Always Faithful (whose editor, Purcell Carson, won the award for Best Editing--Documentary), a film that exposed a military cover-up responsible for the deaths and disease of thousands of American citizens. After the death of his daughter to a rare case of leukemia, Master Sergeant Jerry Ensminger investigated deeper into the cause of her death. What he stumbled upon is one of the worst water contamination sites in US history, suppressed from the American public for decades. Semper Fi followed Ensminger's perseverance to hold the government accountable for its actions. 

Ensminger's presence after the screening, as well as that of his fellow activists, elicited raucous applause from the audience. Rather than questions, he was met with a parade of endorsements. "You're a great American," said one audience member. 

To further contextualize the program, the festival hosted a collection of panels, one of which was called, "Are Documentaries Changing the World?" Dan Cogan, executive director and co-founder of Impact Partners, broke down social issue documentaries into three components: (1) great works of cinema; (2) opportunities for community engagement; and (3) source material for political campaigns. The majority of the social issue docs featured in the festival struck a perfect balance among all three. For the ones that didn't, Cogan had this to say: "If you're not a storyteller, you're not an activist."

The festival also included films that challenged the very premises of documentary. Bombay Beach, winner of the World Documentary Competition, paralleled the lives of three subjects--a bipolar child, an aspiring football player and an 80-year old poet/prophet--all living around the Salton Sea in southern California. Director Alma Har'el, who previously worked in music videos, applied her sensibilities to a tone poem containing aspects of nonfiction and performance. Using songs by Bob Dylan and Beirut, she lends an anachronistic quality to the Salton Sea. Once a breeding ground for tourists and now a toxic lake surrounded by relics of another time, it becomes a otherworldy space for imagination.

Nancy Schafer, the executive director of the Tribeca Film Festival, spoke on its evolution: "For these first few years after 9/11, our guiding principle [is] that cinema can heal our community. This focus on the power of cinema to foster change is still what Tribeca is at its roots."

Whatever concerns some might have about the direction the festival has taken over the years, Tribeca hosted a collection of films that demonstrated that documentary is alive and well. 

Daniel James Scott is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Brooklyn. He is originally from Los Angeles, and also contributes essays and criticism to Filmmaker Magazine and Cinespect (cinespect.com).

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival was launched in 1997 as the Double Take Documentary Film Festival, sponsored by the Documentary Studies Program at Duke University. In 2002 the festival parted with the Duke program and adopted its current name.

Led for 10 years by founder Nancy Buirski, the event grew, prospered and became internationally known. Buirski stepped aside in 2008 to pursue filmmaking, and the resourceful Peg Palmer provided two years of interim leadership. Deirdre Haj was named director just prior to the 2010 festival.

Through 2011 Haj has guided the festival's return to Duke's Documentary Studies Program. "Our missions have never been more aligned," she asserts. "Our borrowing from each other's strengths would create even more benefits for the communities we serve: the documentary community and Durham, North Carolina." 

In addition to the festival, Full Frame produces year-round, outdoor free screenings at American Tobacco; a Full Frame Fix at the local Nasher Museum; an annual, festival-oriented Teach the Teachers program; and a summer Documentary Production Camp for non-traditional learners. 

A newcomer would notice a few changes at Full Frame. The four days were, as usual, crammed with documentaries, but Haj tried some streamlining. In the past, panels would be scheduled during screenings. Not so this year.  Sponsored by A&E IndieFilms, panel conversations were scheduled in open slots and were held in The Speakeasy,  a comfortable space next to the Press Room, where, at the 3:30 pm session, if you were of age, you got a free cocktail! 

It was in this Speakeasy venue that Pat Aufderheide, director of American University's Center for Social Media, led a panel presentation titled "Wrongs and Rights: Protecting Subjects and Footage."  Two New York lawyers, David Smallman and Karen Shatzkin, both with extensive experience defending documentary films and their makers, were joined by two filmmakers, the legendary Alex Gibney  (Taxi to the Darkside, Enron, Casino Jack.) and trial lawyer-turned-filmmaker Susan Saladoff  (Hot Coffee) to offer advice and answer questions from filmmakers in the audience. Aufderheide also passed out info on the Center's latest publications, "Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put the Balance Back in Copyright" and "Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work."

Festival programmers selected four films for the Center Frame showcase, which typically screen works of intrinsic quality and audience appeal. Julie Moggan's feature-length Guilty Pleasures, which opened the festival, was allegedly inspired by the startling statistic that "every four seconds, somewhere in the world, a Harlequin paperback is sold." Moggan focuses on five individuals, women and men, from England, Japan, India and the US, whose lives are changed by their connections to these romance novels. These characters were so ordinary and relatively uninteresting at first impression, but by the end of the film, I was cheering for them to make the changes necessary to bring fulfillment and happiness. Guilty Pleasures was a sort of romance novel in itself.

The second night's Center Frame film, the world premiere of Nancy Buirski's The Loving Story, was riveting. It tells the story of newlyweds Richard and Mildred Loving, who were arrested in 1958 in the middle of the night in their Virginia home, convicted of the crime of interracial marriage, and banished from both their home and the state of Virginia.  Told with remarkable, never-before-seen archival footage shot by documentarian Hope Ryden, the film charts the couple's courage and perseverance as two young ACLU lawyers, Bernie Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, agree to take on the case.  They eventually argue it all the way to the US Supreme Court.  The Lovings' conviction is overturned, and the state of Virginia's anti-interracial marriage legislation is inevitably doomed. HBO co-produced the film, which will air in 2012.

Saturday evening's Center Frame screening, the US premiere of Burma Soldier, was followed by the presentation of Full Frame's 2011 Career Award to filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg. The brief ceremony honored their earlier works--In My Corner, The Trials of Darryl Hunt, The Devil Came on Horseback and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. One of the filmmakers quipped that her children asked her if this meant she was going to retire!

Burma Soldier, on which Nic Dunlop is also credited as director, tells the story of Myo Myint, who joined the Burmese army as a teenager, lost an arm and leg in the service and after discharge began to question the harsh, half-century of military rule in his country. Eventually deemed a dissident, he was arrested, tortured and imprisoned for 15 years. He escaped to Thailand when released from prison and made his way to the US. His story about a very secretive country is compelling, and was made only more so by his personal appearance with the filmmakers during the Q & A that evening. 

Full Frame always invites a person of significance in the documentary community to program a series of films around a particular theme. The thematic program for this year was handled by archivist Rick Prelinger and was titled "One Foot in the Archives." The ten programs included films such as Lance Bird's America Lost and Found; Philippe Mora's Brother Can You Spare a Dime; Louis DeRochemont and Lother Wolff's March of Time: One Day of War---Russia 1943; and the intriguing Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. The film, by Göran Hugo Olsson, consisted of Swedish TV journalists' coverage of the Black Power movement in the US--an interesting view of our own culture through another country's perspective. 

But for me, the session on "Raw Material, Indigestible?" was priceless because it featured Prelinger himself presenting clips from his own Prelinger Archives. What can we learn from a home movie of a Ku Klux Klan rally in a small town in Pennsylvania? How can we judge the filmmaker's motive, if that is important? Should filmmakers use or withhold (as Rick did in his presentation) graphic excerpts they find in archives of electric shock treatment forced on patients in a state mental hospital? The emerging question of archival reuse was centermost in our enlightening class, conducted by a very masterful Professor Prelinger.

There were 66 films in competition and I saw just 12 of them, but one I found surprising, fascinating and fulfilling was The Boy Mir----Ten Years in Afghanistan. This unusual film shows us what has happened over the last ten years to Mir, whom we met as an eight-year-old in Phil Grabsky's 2004 doc The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan.  Although he had originally planned just one return to Bamiyan--to show his finished film to the family--Grabsky made several trips to Northern Afghanistan to follow Mir's growth into a young man. The result is an unforgettable portrait of a boy's, and a country's, development. Scenes of the region's stark beauty contrast sharply with the struggle for survival that the Afghan people face. Penetrating, respectful, absorbing and revelatory, Grabsky's style is both refreshing and responsible. Over the 10-year period, he has established a fund, begun with the proceeds from his films about Mir, to assist in the young man's education and further development.  

Another film in competition that impressed me was Hot Coffee. Former Oregon trial lawyer Susan Saladoff  begins the film by referencing the celebrated case of the woman who successfully sued McDonald's for millions of dollars when she spilled hot coffee on her lap. I stopped by for ten minutes on the way to another screening to see what in the world a filmmaker would do with such a frivolous law suit. Well, in ten minutes Saladoff had laid out a case that changed my views 180 degrees in terms of what I thought of this case and the important issues linked to it.    

 What I learned from Hot Coffee was how corporate America, aided by our frivolous and crass media outlets, have shaped and corrupted our view of the civil justice system.  Politicians, in cahoots with big business, used this case and others like it to distort our views of tort reform, state-mandated caps on malpractice awards, and mandatory, closed-door arbitration with the arbiters picked by the very corporation that you are claiming wronged you.  If you own a credit card or cell phone, you have probably agreed to mandatory arbitration. Asked about how her former profession figures in her filmmaking, Saladoff remarked, "Displaying facts and evidence on film is like presenting material evidence to a jury."  

Two other films in competition caught me by surprise. One was We Still Live Here -Âs Nutayuneân. Directed and produced by Anne Makepeace, it chronicles the story of the Wampanoag Indians, who greeted the Pilgrims in 1620, and subsequently lost their language--which they have now painstakingly regained, thanks to the amazing efforts of Jesse Littledoe Bair, through her use of historic contracts, old deeds and footnotes in native Bibles. A very moving film, it won the Full Frame Inspiration Award.

The other eye-opener was Hell and Back Again, artfully created by still photographer  Danfung Dennis. Embedded with a company of men from the 2nd Battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment, Dennis shot some of the most powerful and stunning battlefield footage  I have ever witnessed.  As the men tangle with the always nearly invisible Taliban in Afghanistan, Sergeant Nathan Harris is wounded.  The image and sound in the film switches brilliantly back and forth from the turmoil of war to Nathan's physical and emotional turmoil as he attempts, with the tender and patient care of his young wife, to come back from three tours of duty and his serious injuries.

In addition to the Center Frame films and the thematic program, the festival invited some 16 films, one of which was Barbara Kopple's Gun Fight, which affirms her stunning record of making timely and important films about controversial subjects. It features some interesting characters: Colin Goddard, survivor of eight bullet wounds in the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, who stumps tirelessly for sensible gun legislation; and Garen Wintermute, ER physician from UC Davis Medical Center, who pleads in Sacramento for help in closing the "gun-show loophole," which allows almost anyone with the money to buy all manner of weapons, including assault rifles, from "private owners" at gun shows. Another compelling figure in the film is Richard Feldman, who for 20 years was head of PR and legislative activities for the National Rifle Association, but became disillusioned by the politics of it all. He now tries to hold a centrist position in calling for sensible gun regulation. Hearing all these folks speak in person after the film was quite moving and informative.

The Festival was enriched with two Kartemquin films on its schedule, as well as Gordon Quinn and Steve James in attendance.  One, The Interrupters, directed by James, was in competition and won a Special Jury Award from the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. It follows three members of the Chicago CeaseFire Organization into live, threatening and violent situations where they use skills and insights gained from their own complicated and violent past lives to help those involved to a solution that eschews violent retaliation.

 The other Kartemquin film was the world premiere of A Good Man, a film about the incomparable dancer/choreographer, Bill T. Jones. It chronicles his struggle, both aesthetically and emotionally, to produce a commissioned contemporary dance concert honoring Abraham Lincoln. Quinn and Bob Hercules capture both the man and the process in this absorbing and informative work.

 The Festival had also screened Magic Trip. Created by Alex Gibney and Allison Ellwood, the work was indeed quite a trip for those of us who watched it late on Saturday night.  The filmmakers did the impossible: making a reasonably cogent film out of the endless amount of footage shot in 1964 by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters on their bus trip from California to New York and back.

The 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is scheduled for April 12-15.  For a complete listing of festival winners and other information about the event, click here.

Ron Sutton is Professor Emeritus in the Visual Media Department of the School of Communication at American University.

"Louder Than a Bomb" launches its nationwide theatrical rollout with a run at the IFC Center in NYC from May 18-26. Co-directors Greg Jacobs & Jon Siskel will be in attendance at the evening screenings May 18-21, along with two of the film's stars—Nate Marshall & Nova Venerable. Tickets and showtimes available on Monday, May 16 after 6:00 pm.

"Louder Than a Bomb" was part of IDA's 14th Annual DocuWeeks program in 2010 and was one of the audience favorites. The 15th Annual DocuWeeks Theatrical Documentary Showcase is set for Los Angeles: August 19 - September 8 at Sunset 5 and New York: August 12 - September 1 at IFC Center.

For more information on LTAB's in NYC, please visit the LTAB website.

WHAT CRITICS ARE SAYING ABOUT LTAB

"Inspiring and electrifying...If the Louder Than a Bomb finals were telecast the way high school sports are, I have a feeling their audience would grow by the minute."
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"An affecting and superbly paced celebration of American youth at their creative best..."
Robert Koehler, Variety

"Four Chicago high-school poetry teams dazzle, inspire and kick serious ass with words as they prep for the world's biggest youth poetry slam. Thankfully their journey is never saccharine. What it is: powerful and exhilarating."
Liz Plosser, TimeOut Chicago

"It's impossible to be unmoved by these school kids, some from badly broken homes, who eloquently reveal their inner emotions on stage...It's a get-up-and-clap kind of movie."
Tim Basham, Paste Magazine

"One of the most inspiring and exhilarating documentaries in months, or maybe years...Vibrant and moving."
Steve Pond, The Wrap

"A genuinely stirring hometown chronicle. As these writer/performers collaborate with their colleagues, mentors and notebooks en route to the competition, "Louder Than a Bomb" becomes an ode to Chicago's diverse voices. Irresistible."
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

"This probably isn't the most criticky way to start a review, but I love this movie so much"
Dayna Papaleo, Rochester City Newspaper

"What 2002's hit Spellbound did for spelling bees, this inspiring documentary does doubly well for high school spoken-word poetry slams. The ending isn't as neatly uplifting as you might expect, but you'll be riveted until the final explosive verse."
Seth Kubersky, Orlando Weekly

"Louder than a Bomb is an exhilarating film, presenting a great range of talents. There are poems and performances here that are funny, others moving, and the whole of the film is brimming with vitality. Many of these poems took me by surprise. I think all kinds of poetry can do that when we're lucky."
W.S. Merwin, U.S. Poet Laureate

"Calling 'Louder Than a Bomb' a documentary is doing it a disservice. It is an important film acted by real-life kids with real-life issues. It has drama and an arc that most dramatic films struggle to achieve. The soundtrack is powerful and engaging. This movie explodes off the screen and into your heart."
Tom Silverman, Tommy Boy Founder and New Music Seminar Co-Founder/Co-Director

"Becoming Chaz" is the heartfelt and honest portrayal of Chaz Bono, the only child of Sonny & Cher, on his emotional and physical transition from a woman to a man. This highly anticipated documentary premieres

Watch a sneak peek and follow Chaz on his deeply inspirational and personal journey.

Find OWN on your TV.

The 21st-century marriage of the digital revolution with China's drive toward First World status, and the resulting collateral damage, have been auspicious for nonfiction filmgoers outside China. Cheap, portable digital technology has seeded a flowering of uncensored documentaries about this country that sadly will remain unseen by ordinary Chinese, given scant venues and their outspoken criticism of authorities' mistreatment of minorities, victims of tragedy and artists. Shot with low budgets and under the radar of government surveillance--but not without a fair share of confrontations with authorities caught on film--these works earned San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' recent series title "Fearless: Independent Chinese Documentaries."

This series, and many others in the US, have been happening thanks to dGenerate Films, the New York-based distributor of contemporary independent Mainland Chinese works. Outstanding documentaries make up the bulk of the company's ever-growing catalog.

Many of the six works featured in "Fearless" are long. To quote a programmer's characterization of a recent overall trend in film-festival films, they "find their own length." The subjects of these works have convoluted histories that need to be told. Conventional running times don't do them sufficient justice, and the patient viewer at any rate soon finds herself deeply and rewardingly immersed.

The series kicked off with its most grueling and finest film, Karamay (2009), with a wholly justified six-hour-plus running time. Everybody in China knows about the "12/8/94 Incident" in which 323 people died, 288 of them schoolchildren, in a fire that broke out in the cheaply constructed and illegally modified Friendship Theatre in the oil company town of Karamay in far northwestern Xinjiang province. Because the children died obeying instructions to remain seated so that inebriated Communist Party cadres could escape first, the government hastily assured the bereaved that the victims would receive "national martyr" status--one of many promises that it didn't keep. The children didn't even receive death certificates, which left them disgracefully nameless. Moreover, the middle-class parents of the dead children were subjected to firings, surveillance, ostracism, arrest and even beatings when they conducted their own investigation and petitioned for reparations. Director Xu Xin visits the victims' families on the 13th anniversary of the tragedy and records their still explosive rage and recriminations.

The fourth hour of the film is devoted to the extraordinary soliloquy of one father, who comes closest to positing an overarching conspiracy theory for the tragedy. In indirect language whose import gains devastating power, he methodically indicts all the responsible parties in the incident, evoking a China that has broken down at every possible level. This is politically engaged cinema at its most appalling best--a must-see. YBCA Curator Joel Shepard reports, "Amazingly, we had zero walk-outs for Karamay."

Xu was hoping to world-premiere his new film Pathway this May at the 8th (independent) Documentary Film Festival China in Beijing, but organizers cancelled the entire festival, citing "a lot of pressure," without elaborating.

Ghost Town (2008) is also about people living on the geographical and ethnic margins of Chinese society--this time in Yunnan province near the border with Burma, a town gradually being abandoned by its inhabitants for the city because they can no longer scrape together a living there. The film follows citizens still making an effort: father-son Christian preachers; a young trucker in love with a girl about to be sold to another man; a pair of alcoholic brothers wearing out the patience of their womenfolk; and a 12-year-old boy abandoned by his parents who traps birds, cooks fry bread and hauls rocks for a living, but still finds time to play like a child or sit quietly in a church pew. The town's dwindling population shows plenty of life, nonetheless, notably in an enthralling shot of a church congregation wearing colorful knit caps singing a hymn, which rivals the pan shot of boat passengers in the opening sequence of Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life.

The title 1428 (Du Haibin, 2009) refers to the hour at which the 2008 Sichuan earthquake struck; this film refutes the implicit conclusion of the recent Aftershock, a melodrama bookended by the 1976 Tangshan and 2008 Sichuan temblors and China's top-grossing locally made film. In that fiction film's feel-good ending, the heroine, whose family was torn apart in the earlier quake, joins government rescue operations in Sichuan with full confidence that this time they have gotten it right. 1428 puts the lie to that complacent and dangerous attitude, as it details governmental neglect and abuse of the victims and survivors of Sichuan-first, 10 days after the quake and again, seven months later.

Disorder (Huang Weikai, 2009) is the most hyperbolic of these documentaries--aptly called by journalist Chris Chang "a city symphony from hell," and a near sellout at YBCA. In grainy black-and-white footage taken from dozens of videographers, the film cross-cuts various chaotic happenings in Guangzhou seemingly at the same time: the confiscation of contraband bear and anteater parts from a supermarket; a motorist pleading with a semiconscious man on the road to accept a monetary settlement before the cops tow his car; a diner demanding satisfaction for a roach found in his noodles; a man threatening to jump from a bridge and another dancing in traffic; pigs running loose on the highway; a baby found abandoned in a trash-filled lot. The overwhelming impression conveyed by this film is, again, a China in utter chaos, broken down at every level.

Two profiles of individuals rounded out this remarkable series. Fortune Teller (Xu Tong, 2010) follows an old soothsayer as he hobbles from town to town with his physically and mentally disabled wife (and their cat in a plastic bag), visiting members of their family who abused them in the past. Meanwhile, he hones his fortune-telling craft by learning from other roving diviners and testing his skills at rural festivals. He advises prostitutes, predicting their lonely and unlucky fates. It's wrong to pity this couple despite their poverty and disabilities, since he has canny street instincts and a wicked twinkle in his eye and she has been rescued from the horrific barnyard existence her family inflicted on her. Tape (Li Ning, 2010), five years in the making, uses a mixture of re-enactment, musical performance, special effects and experimental street theater to document Li's life as performance artist and leader of an unruly avant-garde troupe. Torn between his artistic imperatives and pressure to conform to the conventional roles of husband and father, Li depicts a wildly entertaining and poignant portrait of the artist. (Sadly, his "Honey" is forced into the stereotype of nagging wife.)

Even at their bleakest, these documentaries are a caustic tribute to the spirit of the Chinese people, for whom absurdity and disaster have become a way of life. If only they could see their lives, and their overlords, reflected in these fearless films.

Frako Loden is a Berkeley-based writer who teaches ethnic studies and film history.

HBO has teamed with NALIP to find the next great Latino documentary film. They will award $10,000 to the winner of their 2011 Documentary grant. Applications are now being accepted. Deadline is June 10 to submit

Social change has been the consistent undercurrent for HBO's critically acclaimed and award-winning documentary programs, with myriad issues presented in uncompromising quality and honesty. HBO created this $10,000 cash award for Latino filmmakers, and announced the third annual contest at The New Now conference in April.

Applications are now available to submit your documentary project. One Latino Filmmaker will win $10,000.

Deadline is June 10, 2011. For more information, please visit the NALIP website by clicking here.

Doc U: Straight Shooting
A Conversation with World-Class Documentary DPs
April 25 in Los Angeles at The Cinefamily

THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT. THERE WILL BE A WAIT LIST AT THE DOOR.

 The documentary filmmaker/cinematographer faces many complex challenges, from keeping abreast of the latest camera technologies and post-production workflows to following the subtle clues of a developing story as it is happening, clues often hidden in a look or a gesture and invisible to everyone else but the person looking through the camera lens. What are some of the ethical (and technical) problems unique to this kind of documentary storytelling? As filmmakers, how do we nurture the confidence of our subjects in such a way that they will feel comfortable opening up to our cameras without ultimately betraying their trust when we leave? What are some of the techniques that documentary DP's use in the field to handle second-by-second decisions and never-to-be-repeated moments? How has the very process of filmmaking changed for the doc "shooter" with the arrival of lightweight digital video cameras? How does each one of these filmmakers work to push the boundaries of their craft every time they start a new film or go out on a new shoot?

Join Joan Churchill, James Longley, Haskell Wexler and moderator Richard Pearce in a rich conversation about the unique POV of the documentary shooter.

Panelists:
Joan Churchill, ASC, James Longley, Haskell Wexler, ASC

Moderator:
Richard Pearce

When:

Monday, April 25, 2011
Doors Open: 7:00pm
Discussion & Audience Q&A: 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Wine Reception to Follow

Where:

The Cinefamily
611 N. Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Parking:

Metered parking available for free after 6pm, and non-permitted parking
in neighborhoods behind The Cinefamily

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: