DocuWeeks™ helps to qualify outstanding new feature and short documentaries for Academy Award® consideration, by providing its participants a commercial theatrical exhibition in Los Angeles and New York.

Among other requirements, to be eligible for consideration for the 84th Academy Awards®, a feature documentary film must complete a seven-day commercial theatrical run (screening twice daily) in the County of Los Angeles and in the Borough of Manhattan between September 1, 2010, and December 31, 2011. Short documentaries must complete a seven-day commercial theatrical run (screening once per day) in the County of Los Angeles or in the Borough of Manhattan.

DocuWeeks provides one-week theatrical runs in Los Angeles and New York City, as well as the required advertising and publicity support. 

The Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival, which wrapped on May 8 after 11 days of screenings, pitch sessions and workshops, had its iconic status with Toronto's discerning public confirmed again this year. Audience numbers rose to over 150,000, representing an increase of 11 percent over the previous year, while box office revenue showed a 24 percent jump over 2010. Yet despite increased national media attention and wide interest abroad, including massive delegations from Italy and the Netherlands, all was not sanguine at the festival.

 "There was a dip in delegates, in registration revenues. That's telling," notes Chris McDonald, executive director of Hot Docs. While pleased with the great success of the festival, he acknowledges, "These are difficult times for filmmakers in Canada. A lot of them are closing up shop. So we took a bit of a hit [in the industry side], but it was more than offset by the box office."

That's the current drama in documentaries--and the irony. Just as docs are hotter than ever, traditional sources no longer want to fund them. Canada's CBC and other publically minded broadcasters around the world have had their funding cut back significantly in the past half-decade. Commercial 'casters are designating reality TV shows as docs. In an economically challenged environment, with audiences diminished by the so-called 500-channel universe, docs with a point-of-view are rarely being commissioned.

In what was likely the most significant move at the festival, Hot Docs announced a new million-dollar initiative to finance films in Africa. The first international fund to be administered by the festival, it is financed by Blue Ice Films, a production company run by Neil Tabatznik and Steven Silver, whose feature docu-drama The Bang Bang Club has opened across North America in the past month.

The South African-born Silver has lived in Canada for decades and is a former senior vice president of factual entertainment at one of this country's media giants eOne [Entertainment One)]. "He has been on our board for the past year and a half and during that time, he's gotten to know us," says McDonald.

"The fund is for African filmmakers," McDonald continues. "The non-equity grants will range from 10 to 40 thousand dollars. Each grantee will work with a Canadian company as a national partner. The Canadian companies won't necessarily be rights holders; it will be more of a mentorship process, depending upon how the project is structured.

"The point is to help the project in the international marketplace," he says. "There will be money set aside so that the filmmakers will be able to come to Hot Docs to take a place in the Forum and the festival and the marketplace."

The first application deadline for the fund will be in the fall of 2011, with guidelines to be announced in September. The five-member selection committee will be comprised of representatives from Hot Docs, Blue Ice Film and other international industry members.

McDonald points out that "this new initiative joins the Shaw Media-Hot Docs Funds in what we hope will be an ever-widening portfolio of production funds to support filmmakers, both in Canada and abroad.

"The marketplace is changing," he maintains. "It's becoming increasingly difficult to finance films in Canada. We've decided that there's a role for us to play beyond the conventional ways we've been supporting filmmakers. Creating funds to help filmmakers both here and abroad is an important part of that mandate.

 "Creating Crowdfunding sites and working with Crowdfunding partners internationally are important, as is fiscal sponsorship," McDonald explains. "So is encouraging Canadian foundations to support documentaries to the levels that we see their American counterparts do in media arts. We're being more pro-active than we have previously."

Another way that the festival encourages filmmakers is through the Shaw Media-Hot Docs Funds Forum Pitch Prize, which awards $40,000 to the best Canadian pitch at the Forum. On May 5, after over 120 industry stakeholders heard 28 pitches from 12 countries, Sarah Jane Flynn from Shaw Media gave the prize to Doc Pomus. The proposed film is a profile of the colorful blues belter, card shark and songwriter, who was one of the composers of "This Magic Moment" and "Save the Last Dance for Me."

Injecting excitement into a lackluster Forum was The Jungle Prescription, a film proposed by the creative duo of Mark Ellam and Robin McKenna, with Nomad Films producer Mark Johnston, about the controversial ayahuasca vine, which is purported to have spiritual qualities. Perhaps something mystical rubbed off on the filmmakers, who went from winning the coveted last spot in the Forum by having their card chosen out of dozens in the oh-so-Canadian Mountie's Hat to being the co-recipients of the "real cash, no strings attached" prize for pitching a "powerful and unique project." That prize, garnered by passing around a Cuban Hat, included over $100 US, over $900 Canadian, two Euros, a shequel, two Brazilian Reals, one Australian pence and a Toronto transit coin, as well as much larger amounts from Montreal's Eye Steel Film and international sales agent Jan Rofekamp's Film Transit.

The winner of the Hat itself was commissioning editor Nick Fraser of BBC's legendary Storyville program. He was, as the Brits would say, "full value" for the prize, having called a project on writer John Irving "awesomely normal," while deeming a proposed film about an activist theater movement in Belarus "a fucking great project."

Given the confluence of filmmaking and financing at the festival, it's appropriate that Morgan Spurlock opened Hot Docs with POM Wonderful presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (the filmmaker says that the title should just roll off your tongue). The deft repartee between Spurlock and Hot Docs senior programmer Sean Farnel after the screening won over the majority of the tastemakers who attend such occasions, but it's true that an ironic film about branding offended some hard-core documentarians. One in particular commented, off the record, that Spurlock's doc was "the most profoundly cynical film of all time." When the film started its commercial run on the second Friday of Hot Docs, it received quite favorable reviews.

With so many films attracting sell-out crowds, the choice of winners was highly contested. Nine awards and more than $72,000 were handed out as the festival neared its conclusion. The Best Canadian Feature, which comes with $15,000, was given to Family Portrait in Black and White, Julia Ivanova's compassionate treatment of a tough but loving woman who has raised a multicultural group of orphans in rural Ukraine. Dividing the second Special Jury prize worth $10,000 were At Night, They Dance, Isabelle Lavigne and Stéphane Thibault's film about a family of belly dancers in Cairo, and Thomas Selim Wallner's The Guantanamo Trap, about a German Islamist, who spent time illegally on the Cuban island as a prisoner of the US military. Interestingly, all the major Canadian prize-winning films weren't about indigenous events or characters.

The Best International Feature, which is awarded $10.000, went to Dragonslayer, Tristan Patterson's devastating look at California during its present economic crisis. The Sundance Channel's People's Choice Award was given to Linda Goldstein Knowlton's Somewhere Between, a US film about four Chinese-born adoptees. Both US films fit as closely with the zeitgeist of today's perilous times as those of their Canadian hosts.

Based in Toronto, Marc Glassman is editor of Point of View magazine and Montage magazine.

5/21 @ 7:00pm
NORTH KOREA-A-RAMA!:
The Red Chapel
shown with
The Frustrated Fascist Auteurism of Kim Jong-il

The Frustrated Fascist Auteurism of Kim Jong-il - 7:00pm
Ever since his early days overseeing his papa’s “Propaganda and Agitation” department in the late ‘60s, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il has had cinema on the brain: his first mistress was a film star, he reportedly owns several libraries’ worth of DVDs, he’s personally overseen the production of many features -- and he’s even written a textbook called “On The Art Of The Cinema”! From overly earnest “tractor operas” to parade-sploitation choreography porn, all the way through to the 1985 Big Rubber Monster-laden anti-capitalist allegory Pulgasari, North Korea’s rich movie culture is ripe for exploration -- so join us for a smattering of Cinefamily’s favorite film and video clips culled from decades’ worth of the DPRK’s secret history of light entertainment!

The Red Chapel - 7:30pm
"Incredibly, uncomfortably funny! Like a love child of The Idiots and Borat." -- Alison Willmore, IFC.com

Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, The Red Chapel is perhaps the most dangerous and compelling cinema prank ever committed, and puts all other piddly culture-jammers to shame. In the tradition of Michael Moore, Sacha Baron Cohen and The Yes Men, a trio of Danes -- muckracking journalist/TV personality Mads Brügger, comedic straight man Simon and self-proclaimed “spastic” Jacob -- fearlessly travel to North Korea under the guise of a "cultural exchange": pretending to be a small theatre group called The Red Chapel, they present themselves as regime sympathizers and join in on an absurd variety show in Pyongyang, for the purpose of collecting footage of the regime from the inside. Beyond its sharp humor, The Red Chapel is amazing because the stakes are extremely high: our heroes are not just pranking a governor, a CEO or an arena full of beer-blasted hicks -- they’re messing with one of the most notorious, mysterious and literally insane Big Brother-esque regimes ever created. Epic, terrifying stuff.
Dir. Mads Brügger, 2009, DigiBeta, 88 min.

Tickets - $10/free for members

 More information available at http://www.cinefamily.org/calendar/events.html#redchapel

A self-shooter, who also appears in his own films, Doug does not shy away from exploring his family's stories, even when it becomes uncomfortable. His lyrical, beautiful cinematic films invite us all into his family's inner dialogue, and allow us to reflect to how closely they mirror our own.

How did his filmmaker journey lead him to making personal documentaries? What are the hardest moments he's had to face while making work about his family? How has he developed the ability to still make strong directorial choice when the subject of his films is, quite literally, so close to home? How does he navigate production as a self-shooter who is in the film?

Join moderator Marjan Safinia for an intimate conversation with Doug Block, and learn more about the risks and rich rewards of making a personal documentary film, and the wisdom he's gained from a lifelong career as a documentary filmmaker.

The evening's on-stage conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A, and a reception on the Cinefamily's backyard Spanish patio!

Join IDA now! For discounted admission prices and more!

Special support provided by:

Big personalities and big issues dominated the documentaries at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival. Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie Galloway's Better This World, the story of two naïve and idealistic young Texans who fall under the spell of a charismatic FBI informant and are prosecuted for domestic terrorism during the 2008 Republican National Convention, earned two Golden Gate Awards, for Documentary Feature and for Bay Area Documentary.  The film is as gripping as any fictional drama, with two thoughtful and articulate protagonists.  

The drama in Yoav Potash's Investigative Documentary Feature Award winner, Crime After Crime, is even more riveting, as two lawyers struggle for years to free a woman who's spent decades in prison for her involvement in the death of her abusive boyfriend. They suffer setback after setback before a bittersweet triumph that reduced audience members to tears.

Both films, along with Susan Saladoff's Hot Coffee, were the focus of a festival "salon," an in-depth discussion about social justice documentaries moderated by San Francisco State University cinema professor Bill Nichols, who also put the genre into historical context. With the infamous case of a lawsuit against McDonald's for serving too-hot coffee as a jumping-off point, Hot Coffee explores how big business is subverting the criminal justice system, and issues a call to action.

As always, documentaries were among the festival's most interesting and innovative films, and several pushed the boundaries of the documentary form.  The Arbor, Clio Barnard's biography of British working-class playwright Andrea Dunbar, who died in 1990 at the age of 29, uses scenes from Dunbar's autobiographical plays, as well as interviews with her family and friends lip-synched by actors, in a technique called "verbatim theater." Barnard filmed in the public housing projects where Dunbar's brief, tragic life played out, often with current residents watching the action. The lip-synching is distancing at first, but after awhile the viewer stops noticing the oddness of the technique, engrossed in the dramas of Dunbar's life, and that of her older daughter.

There's nothing odd about the apparent incongruity in Régis Sauder's Children of The Princess of Cleves. Working class students in a Marseille high school read aloud (and sometimes perform) the words of  a 17th century classic French novel, La Princesse de Cleves, as they prepare to take their baccalauréat, a graduation exam. The life of a 15-year old heiress forced to marry a prince in the court of Henri II, and in love with another nobleman, resonates with these teens. The princess has the same problems they do: strife with her parents, frustrated love, duty versus desire. Framed in loving close-up, the students personify the universality of the adolescent experience.

The unconventional structure of Andrei Ujică's The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu is both the strength and weakness of the film. It begins and ends with footage of the defiant Romanian dictator and his wife being interrogated just before their execution in 1989. He refuses to answer, calling the tribunal a "masquerade." Then begins the real masquerade: three hours of propaganda footage from Ceauşescu's official archives, without narration, portraying the 25 years of his iron rule as a socialist paradise filled with triumphal parades, foreign dignitaries and happy workers with a benevolent papa Ceauşescu presiding. The technique lies somewhere between direct cinema and utter tedium, but whether it might be more effective if it were shorter is debatable. The disconnect between manufactured prosperity and stark reality grows more appalling as the film goes on.

Unlike Ujică, who grew up in Romania during Ceauşescu's regime, Serbian director Mila Turajlic was a year old when Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito died.  During her childhood, Tito was still an influence in Yugoslav life, but after the civil wars that divided Yugoslavia in the 1990s, all traces of him were removed. As a film student, she discovered the Belgrade film studio Avala that was still operating but scheduled for demolition. She decided that the studio's demise would make a great metaphor for the collapse of Yugoslavia. In making Cinema Komunisto, Turajlic painstakingly obtained films from collectors, interviewed surviving filmmakers, and put together a lively, funny and poignant homage to a now-vanished cinema that was  equal parts propaganda and showmanship. One of her interview subjects was Tito's projectionist, who reveals that the dictator watched one film each day from 1949 to his death in 1980. He was such a fan that he personally chose Richard Burton to play him in Sutjeska (1972), about a battle with the Germans in World War II. "Tito wasn't just a film lover," Turajlic said during the question and answer period after the screening. "He was the storyteller, the grand illusionist."

Some of the most compelling documentaries in the festival took on personalities that were larger-than-life, and presented them without commentary. Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion's The Redemption of General Butt Naked profiles Joshua Milton Blahyi, who terrorized Liberia during the civil wars of the 1990s as the leader of the Butt-Naked Battalion, so named because they went on their murderous rampages naked except for their weapons. He later claimed he had killed 20,000 people. But in the late 1990s, Blahyi says he had a conversion, and now preaches the gospel. He testified before a war crimes commission, but many wonder if the "conversion" was actually a convenience to avoid prosecution. Shrewdly, the filmmakers simply present Blahyi's story, and allow the viewers to judge.

Sampat Pal Devi, the subject of Kim Longinotto's Pink Saris, is also a charismatic leader, an Indian woman of India's untouchable caste, who battles violence and discrimination against women. Herself a victim, she vows, "I won't let the world swallow us." She leads her posse of pink-clad women into villages, mediates family disputes, and fearlessly harangues men who victimize their wives, daughters and sisters. Sampat also supports her estranged husband, a flock of grandchildren and her current partner, a hapless man who's unhappy that she's stirring things up. "Show them you can survive!" she tells an abused woman who's threatening to throw herself under a train.

The powerful personality at the heart of Pierre Thoretton's L'Amour Fou is not superstar fashion designer Yves St. Laurent, but his life partner and business manager, Pierre Berge. The film is a gorgeous and touching look at the life and times of the fashion genius, as Berge prepares to dismantle the life they built together by selling their priceless art collection after the designer's death. It's a life the steady Berge made possible even as the emotionally fragile designer indulged in the excesses of his time.

Eva Mulvad's The Good Life purposely evokes the Maysles Brothers' Grey Gardens, but the Danish mother and daughter living in genteel poverty in a Portuguese resort town lack the goofy charm of the Edies. Stoic mother Matte and her whiny, entitled daughter Anne-Matte soon become tiresome, but the splendid cinematography and the very real issues raised by their plight make the film worthwhile.

Errol Morris returns to his exploration of quirky characters with Tabloid, a bizarre and compulsively watchable tale of American beauty queen Joyce McKinney, who in the 1970s followed her Mormon missionary lover to England and took him captive in an attempt to win him back. The saga captivated the British tabloids, and Morris retells the story from the points of view of McKinney, her accomplices and the tabloid reporters. Apparently McKinney regrets opening up. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik later reported that McKinney arrived at one screening "in a limousine marked with graffiti saying the movie was untrue," and sat in the back yelling "liar." From what we've seen in the film, McKinney's latest exploits are totally in character.

Margarita Landazuri works in TV news in San Francisco and writes for the Turner Classic Movies website and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

This past April, the Buenos Aires Lab (BAL), the oldest running production workshop and competition for independent Latin American film, held its tenth anniversary edition. Held within the framework of BAFICI (the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Film), the BAL is a particular event in the world of production workshops in that it puts documentary on equal footing with fictional film--which is to say that documentary filmmakers and producers present their work to juries, possible funders and investors and buyers side by side with filmmakers of fiction (as well as those working in experimental film and animation).

Selected filmmakers and producers can participate through one of three programs run by the BAL: Co-production meetings, the Puentes workshop for Latin American and European producers, and the Work-in-Progress competition. And along with creating possibilities for advancing a film through a co-production deal, pre-sale or funding, the BAL offers over a dozen awards that include film stock and developing, post-production services, and cash. This year's jury included Argentine documentary filmmaker Andrés Di Tella, Spanish documentary producer and educator Marta Andreu, and Vicenzo Bugno, project manager for the Berlinale/World Cinema Fund.

While this year's edition included only four documentary films (out of a total of 32 films), all four docs were in the Work-in-Progress section, and made a very strong showing in the competition for awards.

The Lahaye and Tauro Digital Awards, which include the use of an HD camera kit and post-production sound work, respectively, both went to Aurora, a coming-of-age film that follows the lives of a family of adolescents and young adults from a closed community of German-descended farmers in the northeastern jungles of Argentina. The director, Nele Wohlatz, is a native of Germany who first came to Argentina in 2003 during the economic crisis and did camera work on a couple of documentary films. She moved to Buenos Aires in 2009 and shortly began work on Aurora. Her film is a portrait of both youth at a crossroads and the culture of the Protestant work ethic as it has defined this community for over a hundred years. Speaking of her participation in the BAL, Wohlatz was very pleased with the reactions to the work-in-progress presentation: "In many of the meetings, people mentioned that when they read the synopsis they weren't sure if the film was documentary or fiction, and that the photography gave them a similar feeling about the film."

Another documentary that did well in terms of awards was The Eye of the Shark by Alejo Hoijman, whose previous film Unidad 25 won the best Argentine film award at the 2008 BAFICI; The Eye of the Shark won two Sinsistema Awards. The film follows a pair of youths, Maycol and Bryan, who live in Greytown, a small town on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua where the main opportunities offered for making a living are drug trafficking and shark hunting. In discussing where documentary fits into the BAL and the BAFICI, Hoijman said, "In practice I always try to fight the idea that documentary is a genre. I think that documentary is a kind of cinema that establishes a particular dialogue with that which is real, and this dialogue is different from what we is called fictional narrative film. The BAFICI, and the BAL along with it, is one of the places in the world where they think in terms of cinema and not in terms of fiction or documentary."

The other two documentaries that participated in this year's BAL were also, coincidentally, coming-of-age stories, a strange occurrence that the filmmakers discussed with each other, joking that they were starting a trend.

Normal School by Celina Murga, who is known for her fiction films and who spent a year under the mentorship of Martin Scorscese, follows the lives of students in the upper grades of Argentina's oldest "normal" school, which came out of the standardization movement for public schools in the nineteenth century. The film intimately weaves the threads of the student election and the teachers' union meetings with the day-to-day life of the school. Ezequiel Yanco's Days is an observational documentary that records the lives of ten-year-old twin sisters, Martina and Macaela, as their parents struggle through financial difficulties during Argentina's ongoing economic problems while trying to provide the girls with a normal middle-class life.

For all four films, the rest of the year holds a number of possibilities for acquiring finishing funds and support. Both Doc Meeting Argentina, to be held in September, and DocBsAs, in late November, offer more opportunities for competing for funding and services awards as well as meeting with foreign co-producers, distributors and acquisition editors. And all Argentine or Argentine co-produced films are eligible to apply for funding through various channels from the Argentine Institute for Film and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA).

Richard Shpuntoff is a documentary filmmaker and translator who lives in Buenos Aires and New York City.

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.

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