Richard Leacock, who, with Robert Drew, Albert Maysles and DA Pennebaker, helped revolutionize documentary filmmaking with a dynamic, transformational style known as cinema vérité, has died. He was 89, and he lived in Paris.

According to his website, Leacock was born in London in 1921 and grew up on his father's banana plantation in the Canary Islands-which was the inspiration for his first documentary, made at the age of 14, called Canary Bananas. "I made my first film, aged 14, in 1935," he writes on his website, "and I have been at it ever since, striving to give my viewers a sense of ‘being there.'"

He later graduated from Harvard University, with a degree in physics-which he used "to master the technology of filmmaking." He worked as a combat cameraman in Burma and China during World War II, and later shot Robert Flaherty's seminal Louisiana Story. "More difficult for me to explain is Flaherty's way of looking at things," Leacock writes. "We were constantly panning, tilting, moving the camera, searching. There is rhythm in the filming, rhythm in the captured movements and compositions that are completely at odds with the compositions that work in static imagery. I once went through Louisiana Story looking for stills that could illustrate what I am talking about and found very, very few good stills. What is there is pure film magic constantly in motion."

In the 1950s, with television in its nascent stages, Leacock was invited to make a film for the cultural program Omnibus. The film, Toby and the Tall Corn, documented a traveling tent show in Midwest; it would be his first film since Canary Bananas-and "my final attempt to make a documentary using classical film industry techniques."  

Filmmaker Roger Tilton, a fellow veteran combat cameraman, invited Leacock to film at a jazz club in New York's East Village, and encouraged him to shoot as they had during the war: "We shot wild! NO tripod! Move! Shoot! I was all over the place, having the time of my life, jumping, dancing, shooting right in the midst of everything. We spent a fabulous evening shooting to our hearts' content. Roger and his editor Richard Brummer laid these fragmentary shots in synch with the four pieces of music selected for the film; slow, medium, fast and faster! It worked! On a big screen in a theater, WOW! You were there, right in the midst of it and it looked like it was in synch... it was in synch! We couldn't film dialogue or sustained musical passages this way. But it gave us a taste, a goal."

The quest was on: "I needed a camera that I could hand- hold, that would run on battery power; that was silent, you can't film a symphony orchestra rehearsing with a noisy camera; a recorder as portable as the camera, battery-powered, with no cable connecting it to the camera, that would give us quality sound; synchronous, not just with one camera but with all cameras. What we call in physics, a general solution. Filming an orchestra with two or three cameras, all in sync with a high-quality recorder and all mobile... This became a goal that took another three years of intensive effort to achieve. Remember that the transistor, without which none of these goals could be achieved, was still in its infancy."

By this time, Leacock had found a kindred spirit in Robert Drew, a reporter for Life Magazine, who himself was exploring a less verbal approach to television reporting, without interviews or narrators-purely observational. Leacock had also met DA Pennebaker, who had majored in electrical engineering at Yale University, so with their science degrees they spent the next few years with Drew developing portable synchronous equipment. They were later joined by Albert Maysles, and the four of them headed for Wisconsin to follow Senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey in their quest for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

"We were breaking all the rules of the industry," Leacock writes. "We were shooting and editing our own footage on location. The people taking sound were not ‘sound men'; they were reporters, journalists, trained in finding and telling stories. It was a collaborative work, filmmakers and journalists; not cameramen and soundmen.

"There were no interviews and little narration," Leacock continues. "Bob Drew was executive producer and had final say; he bore the burden of responsibility for the outcome, he worked with us and took sound and sweated over the editing. Primary was shot in about five days with four two-man crews; no script, no lights, no tripods, no questions, no directions, never ask anyone to do anything. Just watch and listen. Then the same people that shot moved into a hotel suite and edited with little film viewers and sound heads. We worked hard and fast, I think we had a cut of the long version in about two weeks."

Over the next four years Drew Associates would continue to raise the bar for documentary filmmaking. Leacock and Pennebaker would later form their own company and produce such classics as Dont Look Back and Happy Mother's Day. Leacock would later film Pennebaker's  Monterrey Pop and Company.

In 1968, Leacock and Ed Pincus were invited to create a new film school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and over the next 20 years his students would include Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Steve Ascher, Jeff Kreines, Joel DeMott, Michel Negroponte, Mark Rance, and many others.

Leacock retired in 1989 and moved to Paris, where he met and married Valerie Lalonde, who would be his filmmaking partner. The couple embraced the digital revolution, beginning with the Video-8, and continuing with every versatile, cost-efficient piece of equipment that followed. "With this new equipment it is possible to make not just documentaries... fiction... whatever you want for very little money. What we will then need is a distribution system more like the book industry, a whole infrastructure that must and will be developed. Then we can make shows that are more than a stop-gap in an entertainment industry. Works that can combine written and motion-picture material in a complex manner that can be savored, thought about and enjoyed where the dreadful People that run Hollywood and Television will have no influence whatever."

In his last years, Leacock was working on his memoir, The Feeling of Being There, a transmedia project that would include a book and a Digital Video Book. For more on that project, click here.

Richard Leacock took us there.

Tickets also available at the door....

Monday, March 21, 2011 
Doors Open: 7:00pm
Discussion & Audience Q&A: 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Wine Reception to Follow

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

$15 IDA Member / $20 Non Member

 ORDER YOUR TICKETS NOW!

Special Support for Doc U provided by:

Los Angeles County Arts Commission
Axis Pro
HBO Archives
Indie Printing
Members and Supporters of IDA

FotoKem, an ongoing supporter of the documentary film community, joins as a sponsor of the 15th Annual DocuWeeks. DocuWeeks presents short and feature length documentaries to appreciative audiences in theatrical runs, designed to qualify the films for Academy Award consideration.

 Thank you FotoKem for being so awesome and
for all that you do for documentary filmmakers!

Doc U: A Conversation with Steve James
Producer-Director of Hoop Dreams

Monday, March 21, 2011
7:30 p.m.
The Cinefamily, 611 N. Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

March's Doc U features an in-depth conversation with Steve James, the producer-director of Hoop Dreams, the landmark documentary hailed by critic Roger Ebert as "the great American documentary." In conversation with IDA's Eddie Schmidt, James will discuss his career, process and work, including his most recent film, The Interrupters, which won audiences over at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and SXSW. It was also just awarded "Best Documentary" at the Miami International Film Festival.

 $15 IDA MEMBERS/$20 NON MEMBERS. TICKETS ON SALE NOW!

Special Support for Doc U provided by:

Los Angeles County Arts Commission
Axis Pro
HBO Archives
Indie Printing
Members and Supporters of IDA

Shooting in the Wild: An Insider's Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom
by Chris Palmer
Sierra Club/Counterpoint
272 Pages
$27.95

In the spectrum of genres that make up the world of documentary filmmaking, wildlife films have always stood out as a curiosity. For the most part neither nonfiction nor narrative films, these programs have occupied a peculiar niche of their own since their inception in the earliest days of filmmaking. And it is for good reason that today, nature filmmakers have their own festivals, award competitions, conferences and professional organizations--by preference setting themselves apart from the rest of the world of nonfiction filmmaking.

What is the reason for this schism? A plausible theory is that the urge to document the natural world differs, on a fundamental level, from the passion to chronicle the affairs of man or educate viewers about the inanimate things that make up our world. In this view, our need to tell stories about the natural world is rooted in our deep and ambivalent relationship to nature--a relationship that has, throughout history, fueled some of our most vivid dreams, nightmares, myths and fables. Even today, the very subject of nature invites an excursion into a realm of unbridled subjectivity--a world of sentimentality, horror and thinly veiled moralization that is strictly taboo to the dedicated documentarian, to the dispassionate observer of the world as it (presumably) is.

The deconstructivist may argue that the individual worldviews of documentary filmmakers of any stripe are, whether consciously or not, reflected in their works. According to this view, all human expressions, deliberate or not, are acts of advocacy and artifices that reveal more about their authors than they do about the subjects they describe. But with wildlife filmmakers, the role of the subjective is impossible to ignore. It is as if a mirror were held up in front of the lenses of their cameras, and wildlife filmmakers, imagining that they are documenting a world that actually exists out there, capture instead a detailed portrait of themselves. Because of this, the works of wildlife filmmakers (and of all other flavors of nature storytellers) offer to the social anthropologist a rich trove of symbolism, mythology and iconography--a mother lode from which it is possible to mine valuable insights into the shifting world of our personal dreams and ideals.

There are few individuals on either side of the Atlantic who are more qualified to write about the world of wildlife filmmaking than Chris Palmer, a career natural history producer who has filled important programming positions at the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation and, most recently, MacGillivray-Freeman Films. His recent book, Shooting in the Wild, is a must-read for any aspiring wildlife filmmaker and an important contribution to the history of a genre that is little understood even by its longtime practitioners.

Palmer's book, though largely devoted to the mechanics and ethics of wildlife filmmaking, includes a few nods to the subjectivist school. Filmmaker Adam Ravetch, co-director of the National Geographic feature Arctic Tale, is quoted as saying, "[The film] is really a metaphor for humans. It says to our audience that if polar bears and walruses in the Arctic can figure out how to overcome the difficult circumstances of their lives during a changing, warming world, then we should be able to as well."

 Keenan Smart, the head of the National History Unit at National Geographic, echoes the subjectivist view in his defense of his channel's sensationalistic Predators at War, the story of the bloodthirsty competition between predators in the African savanna, when drought puts a crimp on their sources of prey. According to Smart, the program was a product of its time in America--with the US at war in the Middle East. He is said to have felt that Americans, because of these troubling circumstances, were particularly interested in war themes and that the film reflected the prevailing socio-political climate.

The culture-rooted nature of natural history is familiar to anyone who is old enough to have watched Disney's so-called True-Life Adventures, the legendary series that introduced "blue-chip" nature programming to audiences around the world. In this series, as Palmer says, Disney "portrayed nature within a middle-class moral code, [using] nature to promote the values of hard work, faithfulness and frugality." Palmer goes on to suggest that this was the prime reason that the series became not only a hit, but a powerful cultural force.

Nature filmmaking of this type is transparent in its advocacy role and in its departure from any pretense at even-handed reportage. In fact, this kind of filmmaking is often referred to as an "art," a term that is generally avoided by mainstream nonfiction filmmakers. The defenders of these emotion-packed, message-laden films are quick to point out that art, as a reflection of human culture, helps us to understand ourselves and to make sense of the world we inhabit. Art, the argument goes, has--or should have--no pre-ordained social responsibility, and artists cannot be held responsible for the culture they reflect in their work. Predators at War, for example, could be defended not as a celebration of savage violence but as an argument for the equitable division of natural resources, as a means to avoid violent conflicts between individuals and nations. Similar arguments against censorship are used in defense of violent movies and video games, of misogynist lyrics in rap music, and of cartoons that mock the Prophet.

But while many forms of artistic expression are clearly understood by their consumers to be artifacts of their creators--personal expressions laced with frequently wild hyperbole--this is not always the case with nature films. Few readers of Animal Farm would confuse its tale with an accurate account of life in a barnyard, and only the youngest fans of Pogo would imagine that it chronicled the daily doings of an opossum and an alligator in a Georgia swamp. However, it is easy--because of the persuasive power of the words and images in nature films--for audiences watching these films to be seriously misled, imagining that the world they see on the screen is a world that actually exists in real life.

Palmer clearly recognizes the power of myth and the special power of the artfully crafted natural history program not only to reflect, but to shape human behavior. But he rails against what he sees as the abuses of the medium through the distortion of scientific facts and, in the worst of cases, the physical and psychological abuse of the subjects that appear in the films. On the latter points, he is certain to find no disagreement.

But Palmer goes further. For he is not shy about proclaiming his own social agenda--the agenda of encouraging, through the power of the media, policies and practices that will work to ensure environmental protection. As he makes clear throughout his book and ultimately confesses, "My personal allegiance is to true conservation films that motivate viewers to take action." While Palmer is prepared to acknowledge the guilty pleasure to be gained from watching a well-made wildlife fable, he comes down strongly on the side of nature films that promote wildlife conservation. So strongly, in fact, that he stops just short of suggesting that nature filmmakers should join together to vow to make the promotion of environmental protection the primary aim of their films.

 Whether or not his readers will subscribe to this view, Palmer has created a consummately literate, meticulously researched and thoroughly thought-provoking work--a book that demands to be read not only for the wealth of insights that it contains but for the challenging issues that it raises. It is certain to make an excellent companion to a book that waits to be written--one that inspires in its readers an informed appreciation of the importance to our lives of the ancient and enduring art of nature storytelling.

Barry Clark is a natural history producer whose first taste of the genre was as a writer for Bill Burrud's Animal World series in the early 1970's, followed by a long stint at Walt Disney, were he had a hand in creating the Wonderful World of Disney wildlife fables. He is currently prepping a 3D production to shoot in Saudi Arabia, a film that, like his other work, is likely to be another marriage of fiction and imagination.

Submit your film for a chance to earn a grant and get worldwide publicity

The Economist Film Project is an initiative by The Economist, in partnership with PBS NewsHour, to showcase the work of independent documentary filmmakers from around the world.

Selected films and the topics they explore will be the subject of news segments airing regularly on PBS NewsHour beginning in March 2011 and continuing through 2011 and into 2012.

The project seeks submissions of completed documentary films on a rolling basis beginning January 10, 2011 and continuing monthly through January 2012. Both documentary shorts and feature-length films may be submitted. The Economist will provide filmmakers whose films are chosen with a grant of $4,000 to produce six to eight minutes of footage from the film (or footage captured during the making of the film) for airing on PBS NewsHour as part of the segment. NewsHour plans to feature approximately three films each month. After airing, the film-oriented news segments will be packaged independently and given additional exposure through various outlets. Their goal is to showcase the selected segments, films, and filmmakers as broadly as possible.

For more infomation, visit
The Economist Film Project website.

According to a report in The Hollywood Reporter, a Mexican appellate court reversed a federal judge's decision to pull from theaters the documentary Presumed Guilty. The film, which earned an IDA/Humanitas Award in 2010 for directors Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith and producer Layda Negrette, which tells the story of two young lawyers and their struggle to free an innocent man accused of murder. Presumed Guilty aired on PBS' POV series and is distributed in the US by Icarus Films.

As previously reported here, one of the subjects in the film--a key prosecution witness-had filed a lawsuit claiming that his appearance in the film was a violation of his right to privacy. The filmmakers and other personnel attached to the film counter that he had been filmed in a public setting, at a public trial, so permissions were not needed.

Prior to the film's suspension, Presumed Guilty had pulled in $3.6 million at the box office-a commendable performance by US standards, and a record-breaking one for a Mexican documentary. The outcry against the judge's decision from many quarters should spur even greater ticket sales when the film returns to the theaters.

The Documentary Channel is currently programming a retrospective of eight nonfiction films produced by Drew Associates. The documentaries air at 8:00 p.m. on consecutive Saturdays. The retrospective began March 5 with From Two Men and a War, a relatively new film produced in 2005. It's a story about how Robert Drew crossed paths with legendary journalist Ernie Pyle during World War II and how their friendship influenced his approach to nonfiction storytelling. The other seven films are classic Drew documentaries that have been archived at the Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1997. 

Primary is slated to air March 12. The 1960 documentary follows John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey contending against each other in a Democratic presidential primary election in Wisconsin. Primary marked the dawn of a new age of direct cinema. There were no interviews, lighting or pre-planning. The cinematographers were Albert Maysles and Ricky Leacock. DA Pennebaker recorded sound. They unobtrusively followed the candidates like flies on the wall, using new lightweight 16mm cameras.

The other films in the retrospective are Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (March 19), The Chair (March 26), Petey and Johnny (April 2), Men of Tall Ships (April 9), Herself: Indira Ghandi (April 16) and LA Champions (April 23). The screenings are augmented with discussions with Drew and his wife Anne, who produced many Drew films, including most of the titles in the retrospective. Kate Pearson, director of programming for the Documentary Channel, moderates the discussions, in which the Drews share memories and insights about the film being featured that evening.

Robert Drew was a correspondent and editor at Life Magazine before he formed Drew Associates in 1960. The company has produced more than 50 nonfiction films, including television specials for ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS and for syndication on subjects ranging from politics to science, sports, arts and international affairs. Drew was the recipient of the IDA Career Achievement award in 1993.

The Documentary Channel, based in Nashville, was officially launched in 2006, under the leadership of founder Tom Neff. James Ackerman succeeded Neff as president and CEO in 2009. The channel programs air on The Dish Network and DIRECTV 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "I admire and appreciate the passion that goes into the making of documentary films and the view of the world that it gives the public," Ackerman says. "At the risk of sounding like I'm about to step onto a soap box, we live in a world today where traditional journalism has became corporate journalism, which tends to be filtered through a point of view set by a person sitting in a corner office. The independent journalists today are documentarians. They are the ones who are shining light on those things that need to be illuminated; they are the ones who are taking us into worlds that we would not have otherwise have access to and exposing us to the truth."

The Documentary Channel's ventures in restoration began with Neff, and under Ackerman's leadership, the channel decided to make an on-going commitment to the restoration of important documentary works for future generations. "We are working with Michael Pogorzelski and Ed Carter at the Academy," says Ackerman. "They are doing extremely important work. Our head of programming, Kate Pearson, created From the Vault, a monthly series of historic documentary films. We ordered five titles through the Library of Congress and three were corrupted with deteriorating footage and audio. I went to Ed Carter and said, ‘If anybody knows where there are good prints for these films, it's going to be you.' That led to our relationship with the Academy. Our first retrospective was eight documentaries produced by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. It included everything from Pennebaker's first documentary, Daybreak Express, all the way through The War Room, their documentary about President Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign team. The next retrospective that we wanted to do was with Bob and Anne Drew. That is when we learned that the Academy has been working on the restoration of their library for years. We identified two films that the Drews wanted to have as part of the retrospective that were in need of restoration. We agreed to fund that initiative: Herself: Indira Gandhi and Petey and Johnny."

According to Robert Drew, prior to the Academy coming to his rescue, he stored his work the old-fashioned way: "We filled a two-car garage next to our house with racks and kept them there, but we were looking for a places to keep it safely, in case our house and the garage burned down. In 1997, the Academy offered to archive our films and we accepted. They sent a huge trailer truck and drove our films across the United States to the Academy archives in Los Angeles. It was a very exciting experience--sort of like the day that your youngest child leaves home. We had been wondering what the future held for the films in our garage archive. Ed Carter was one of the people who came from the Archive to inspect our films; he would open a can and sniff the film. Depending upon how much vinegar he smelled, he would say, ‘We have to work on this one quickly,' or, ‘This one is OK.'"

"We didn't have a complete set of A and B rolls of the film that we did with President Kennedy," Anne Drew recalls. "The archivists at the Academy found the fine grain copies that were made from the A and B rolls. They used them to make a new printing element. They are now working on Herself: Indira Gandhi, the film I made about the prime minister of India. They have saved our films for future generations in ways we could have never anticipated."

As far as the programmatic decision of whittling down the Drew canon to eight films, Ackerman explains that he and his team "wanted the retrospective to span the multiple decades of their work, and weave their story into the context with the interviews done by Kate. I saw Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment years ago. I was absolutely amazed that cameras were allowed into the White House and the Attorney General's office as they were going through the stand-off with Governor Wallace in Alabama. One of the things I learned is, that happened because President Kennedy was fascinated by the work Robert Drew did on Primary."

Academy Film Archive Director Michael Pogorzelski says that the restoration and archiving of classic documentaries produced by the Drews and many others has been an ongoing process to assure that these "priceless stories" are available for future generations. More than 11,000 documentaries are archived by the Academy. "We are very grateful to the Documentary Channel for its generous support of this effort," Pogorzelski says. "We look forward to working with them on future retrospectives."

Bob Fisher has been writing about documentary and narrative filmmaking for nearly 40 years, mainly focusing on cinematography and film preservation.

The most successful documentaries have lasting impact. This concept isn't revolutionary. Any director pouring his or her life into a documentary wants that effort to be worthwhile. But in today's swiftly changing media landscape, how do filmmakers achieve that impact? And perhaps more importantly, how can this new landscape create opportunities that enable the impact we strive for?

There seems to be a lot of talk these days about transmedia storytelling among the documentary community. Certainly there are those who have been aware of the concept since it was first introduced in the '90s and then brought into the mainstream culture in 2003 by MIT professor Henry Jenkins. Commercial media interests have been capitalizing on transmedia storytelling for decades now. 

So just what is it?

Transmedia storytelling is storytelling across multiple forms of media with each element making distinctive contributions to a viewer's understanding of the story. By using different media formats, transmedia creates "entrypoints" through which viewers can become immersed in a storytelling world.

Telling stories across platforms seems a perfect way to create impact. So why hasn't the documentary community fully adopted it?

This is just one of many questions posed at the Center for Social Media's Media That Matters conference which was held in Washington, DC, last month.

Many know the Center for Social Media for their groundbreaking work on Fair Use. But in their 10 years of operation, the Center has also offered a robust programming slate that addresses pressing needs in the documentary community. One of the Center's most successful programs (and perhaps the best kept secret in the documentary community) is its annual conference. 

The conference began in 2005 as a workshop entitled Making Your Documentary Matter.  It was billed as a showcase of strategies and resources for documentary filmmakers.  Over the years it evolved into the Making Your Media Matter conference, tackling issues from public engagement strategies to ethical documentary filmmaking. This year the conference was re-launched as Media That Matters, to celebrate the Center for Social Media's ongoing partnership with Arts Engine, the New York-based nonprofit that "supports, promotes and distributes independent media of consequence." Pat Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media, sees a great synergy in the partnership. "We are thrilled to collaborate with Arts Engine, with which we share values and goals; our separate conferences have a similar approach and attract similar populations. We both want the people who come to our conferences to be alerted to the other one."  

This year's theme for Media That Matters was Storytelling Across Platforms, the goal of which was to demystify the concept of transmedia. Aufderheide says they wanted to "bring it down to earth and practice, and demonstrate creative approaches to using all the media available to support documentarians' objectives." And the speakers at MTM did not fail.  

The most compelling panel was a look at three successful transmedia projects--Jacqueline Olive's Always in Season Island, a Second Life outreach accompaniment to her Always in Season documentary currently in production; Roland Legiardi-Laura's new media project Power Poetry, which grew from his documentary To Be Heard; and Luisa Dantas multi-platform documentary project Land of Opportunity. What was remarkable about these projects is that while each uses a different media platform, they are all engaging and activating the audience outside of the documentary viewing experience. And for many in the documentary community, that is the ultimate goal. 

Transmedia storytelling is an active process.  As Legiardi-Laura pointed out, "A lot of filmmakers think ‘I did my film, now I'll do a website.'  That's very passive."  It's up to the filmmaker these days to recognize the power of the tools they have available to them and to use them.  Yes, for most, money is an issue, but it needn't be an excuse. 

More and more funds are becoming available for transmedia projects.  Alyce Myatt, who was recently appointed New Media Director at the National Endowment for the Arts, announced that the agency's guidelines had been revised to reflect the inclusion of transmedia projects.  And with the advent of Kickstarter, it's becoming easier to raise funds for projects like these.  Legiardi-Laura breaks it down pretty simply: "Ideas, imagination and passion will sustain you.  There are a lot of people doing this development with little money."

And filmmakers shouldn't let their technophobia get in the way of their vision. Olive knew from the beginning that she wanted an interactive platform to explore her subject matter: the dark history of lynching in America.  But she knew she needed help to realize her vision.  Olive began by reaching out to those who could help her.  The National Black Programming Consortium had a new media program that helped her get started.  She also received support from the Bay Area Video Coalition. Once she identified Second Life as the right platform, Olive recruited her development team. She encouraged others not to "be intimidated by the tech folk...They can really help you expand your reach. They can be advocates for your film and they're helping you translate your vision."  Dantas concurred: "If you have an idea and you want to extend the reach of your story beyond the reach of your piece, you need to start to suss out who has the skills set of what you want to do, because there is a huge interest in tech developers in working with more traditional storytellers."

The takeaway from this year's Media That Matters conference can be summed up like this: How do you get heard in a society drowned out by white noise? The first way is to tell a compelling story that draws people to it.  What to do next?  At the end of the film, when people are there with you, they are there with you for a tiny window.  Through transmedia, they can become a storyteller. They can become a participant.

So what are we waiting for?

Lynn Hughes is an award-winning documentary filmmaker living in the DC area. A geek at heart, she also consults on digital media issues and outreach for films and nonprofits.

Niger '66: A Peace Corps Diary takes audiences some 45 years back in time on a journey with 65 idealistic youngsters who made a valiant attempt to make a small part of the world a better place to live. They were Peace Corps volunteers on a mission to the land-locked, poverty-stricken African nation of Niger--some 80 percent of which is in the Sahara desert. The 75-minute documentary was co-produced and directed by Judy Irola, ASC (American Society of Cinematographers), who was one of the early volunteers. She served in Niger for two years, beginning in June 1966. 

"My experience in the Peace Corps influenced the rest of my life," Irola says. "Realizing that poor people can have extraordinary love for their families and not wallow in self-pity, but instead are proud of their contribution to their communities, was a big awakening. 

"In the United States we were told that we were going to save the downtrodden of the world," Irola continues. "Instead, living with these beautiful people side-by-side in their villages helped us to see the dignity in all people, and forced us to fall in love with a beautiful country, no matter how poor it was. None of us ever saw the world in the same way again."

Irola was born and raised in central California, where her grandfather and father were sheepherders of Basque decent. She attended a state college for about two months.  "It was like repeating my junior year in Catholic high school," she recalls. "I phoned my family and said, ‘I want to come home.' My parents weren't too happy. My father said, ‘Girl, I'm not supporting you; find something to do.' So, I enrolled at Central California Commercial College, where I learned how to type, take shorthand and other secretarial skills."

After completing that course of study, Irola moved to London, where she got a temporary job as a secretary, and subsequently worked as a librarian at an air force base in Seville for a couple of months before beginning her journey back home in 1965. "Some friends told me about the Peace Corps, which was relatively new," Irola recalls. "I called their office in DC. They said they were looking for secretaries who could work in their main office in the various nations' capitals."

Irola was given a choice of serving in Africa, Asia or Latin America. She chose Africa. "I was assigned to a training center on the coast of Northern California with other new volunteers going to Niger. After I arrived and was interviewed, they told me that I wasn't going to be a secretary. I was going to train in public health. When I asked why, they said it was because they could tell that I was tough enough to survive!"

After three months of training, she and the other volunteers arrived in Niamey, the capital of  Niger, during the summer of  1966. They spent a week in the capital city, where a doctor made sure they were healthy, since a few of them were already showing symptoms of malaria.

The volunteers travelled on rugged dirt roads in 4-wheel-drive vehicles, on horses and camels to villages across the country. They learned the local languages, including French, since Niger was a French colony. The volunteers established a rapport with the villagers while digging wells for drinkable water, working on agricultural projects that helped educate the farmers, and aiding in health clinics where newborn babies and children got the care they needed.

Peace Corps volunteers in Niger in the mid-'60s. From Judy Irola's Niger '66: A Peace Corps Diary (Co-Prod.: Robert Poter).

After completing her mission in Niger, Irola got a job as a secretary at KQED-TV, the PBS affiliate, in San Francisco, and she moonlighted with the station's news crews on weekends and learned how to use a 16mm film camera.  Within a year, Irola was a full-time news and documentary cinematographer for the station.

In 1972, Irola joined Cine Manifest, a San Francisco-based Marxist-oriented collective of six young, idealistic filmmakers, in San Francisco. They produced independent narrative films and documentaries that reflected their political and social philosophies. In 1979, Northern Lights, which Irola shot for Cine Manifest, won the Camera d'Or Award at the Cannes Festival. The collective had disbanded prior to that premiere, but Irola was inspired enough by that experience to make it the subject of her first documentary, Cine Manifest, which premiered in 2006.

After a decade in New York City, Irola moved to Los Angeles in 1989 and joined the USC film school faculty in 1992. She was tenured and named head of the cinematography program at USC in 1999.

Over the past 40 years, Irola has stayed in touch with fellow Peace Corps volunteers. "Our Peace Corps experience bonded us for life," she maintains. "We have had four reunions since the mid-1970s. In 2005, I asked Robert Potter, who served with me in Niger, if he was interested in collaborating on a documentary about our Peace Corps experience and how it changed our lives."

Potter had experience producing films for the National Park Service. He came onboard as co-producer, editor and cineamtographer. They filmed interviews with some 50 Peace Corps veterans at the 2005 reunion, who shared memories of how the experience affected their lives. Nineteen of those interviews made the cut of the documentary. Irola and Potter also collected 2,500 still photographs--color slides and black-and-white film-- that the volunteers had shot in Niger, and used excerpts from a 16mm recruiting film that the United States Information Agency (USIA) had produced while Irola was serving in Niger. 

"We came home to a different world in 1968," Irola reflects. "There were anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, Gloria Steinem had launched the Women's Liberation Movement, and the Black Panthers were actively engaged in civil rights issues. My friend Josh Morton was part of a group of Yale students who shot a 24-minute film documenting a May Day demonstration in New Haven, Connecticut in 1970.  We used parts of that 16mm black-and-white film to show what was happening in the United States when we came home."

Irola and four of her fellow Peace Corps volunteers returned to Niger in 2008. "It was absolutely thrilling to go back and see the legacy that we left," Irola says. "Niger is still one of the poorest countries in the world. It's over-populated and the capital city is polluted, but the people are extraordinary. There has never been a war in Niger. There are seven tribes who have always lived in harmony.

"I was so happy when we went out into the bush to visit a women's health clinic, where they are still doing everything we trained them to do, including taking care of  their babies and children and feeding them the right foods that are available to them," Irola explains. "That is part of what we taught them 40 years ago. I can't say enough about Doctors Without Borders, who have trained many nurses to help in the clinics.

"When we lived in Niger, only boys went to school," she continues. "Now, girls attending school is mandated by the government. We saw students wearing uniforms and reading books. Two of the news anchors on television are women. I also saw a woman bus driver and a female camerawoman who works at the television station. There are eight women in parliament.

"It's a much more modern country today, yet the people are still poor," Irola notes. "They like Americans. One man who I met 40 years ago said, ‘You Americans are wacky. Fifty years ago, a Black man couldn't vote in your country. Now, you elected one president.'"

Those observations are woven into the context of Niger '66: A Peace Corps Diary, which premiered at the Mill Valley International Film Festival in October 2010. Approximately 120 Peace Corps veterans were in the audience, including 25 who had served in Niger with Irola. They were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, which President John F. Kennedy initiated in March 1961.

Niger '66: A  Peace Corps Diary has been chosen for the 2011 American Documentary Showcase. It is making the rounds of festivals and is being distributed by The Cinema Guild.

Bob Fisher has been writing about documentary and narrative filmmaking for nearly 40 years, mainly focusing on cinematography and preservation.