NALIP's 12th National Conference -
THE NEW NOW: Defining the Future Together

Registration is open for NALIP's 2011 national conference, THE NEW NOW: Defining the Future Together. Scheduled to run in Newport Beach, CA, April 15-17 at the Island Hotel, NALIP's twelfth conference will be the most important Latino media event of the year!

Last Chance Registration is still open until April 11. Visit the conference webpage for program information and to register.

For twelve years, the only annual gathering of the national Latino media field has been the NALIP conference. This event is organized as a creative and business event for Latino filmmakers and those interested in Latino content. NALIP’s 12th conference will be a dynamic, unique and inspiring weekend filled with professional development and networking opportunities. THE NEW NOW will include top-level speakers from the film, documentary and television industries, intimate conversations with artists, and workshops for emerging and mid-career filmmakers. Also included in THE NEW NOW will be pitch and screening events, and the annual Achievement and Estela Awards that celebrate past triumphs and rising talents. Running concurrently will be NALIP’s seventh annual Latino Media Market, a meetings event designed to match executives and funders to projects.

THE NEW NOW: Defining the Future Together is presented by Time Warner and the National Latino Media Council. The 2010 census is about to reveal the ascending significance of the bi-lingual, bi-cultural Latino market. How do filmmakers attract those viewers? How do we use new technologies to access this audience and bring resources to our projects? And what is the Latino market in the New Now? Co-chairs Jimmy Smits and Rudy Beserra have invited top industry professionals and visionaries to help us define a media future that includes Latinos at the table for key decisions and that ensures that our stories are told. Together they have programmed a jam-packed weekend of plenaries and conversations, workshops and networking events, plus an exciting sneak preview screening. All at The Island Hotel in Newport Beach, CA, April 15 – 17, with a special Latino edition of Backstage’s Actorfest on April 14.

THE NEW NOW will feature executives from Warner Bros., Sony, Disney/ABC, Turner, MTV Networks, Telemundo, Lifetime, SiTV, PBS, Smithsonian Networks, NBC, CBS, Fox, CPB, CNN, Showtime, WME and more. It will involve guilds and unions like SAG, WGA, PGA, AFTRA and the DGA while examining the craft of artists like Martin Sheen (“The West Wing”), Sofia Vergara (“Modern Family”) and Sonia Fritz (America). It will have workshops for actors and directors, documentary makers and aspiring television writer/producers. There will be a chance to practice pitching, showcase directing reels, and get in the room with top executives. This will be the Latino media event of 2011!

We look forward to seeing long-time members and industry leaders, along with new members and content creators. NALIP’s 12th annual conference is the place to be if you are a part of or interested in Latino media. Plan to spend a dynamic, creative weekend in THE NEW NOW!

Last Chance Registration is still open until April 11. Visit the conference webpage for program information and to register.

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

 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:

IDA PROUD TO PRESENT THE BENGALI DETECTIVE

The International Documentary Association presents THE BENGALI DETECTIVE at the 9th annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles! IFFLA runs April 12-17 at Arclight Hollywood. The onsite box office opens April 8th at the Cinerama Dome 6360 W. Sunset Blvd, Hollywood, CA 90028. Also check out special festival events like Industry Leadership Awards, Seminars panels ("TRENDS IN THE INDIAN ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY"), and live music & dance performances.

The BENGALI DETECTIVE, directed by Phil Cox, is a documentary about Rajesh and his Always Detective Agency. The film will screen, Wednesday, April 13th at 9 p.m.  To watch the trailer, please visit the film's blog.

Tickets and Passes are now on sale at: www.indianfilmfestival.org

ENVISION:

ENVISION is set for April 8-9 in New York City at the TimesCenter - the 2011 focus is on the UN's MDG #1: eradicating poverty & hunger. This forum combines documentary screenings and selections from docs in progress (the international "Why Poverty?" series) with discussions on the role of women in alleviating poverty, the issue of food security, and the challenge of balancing issues and art in documentary story-telling. Artist and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Harry Belafonte delivers the opening address. This event is sponsored by IFP and the United Nations.

For more information and to register, visit: http://www.envisionfilm.org/

IDA DocuWeeks™ CALL FOR ENTRIES

FOR MORE INFORMATION AND COMPLETE DETAILS,
PLEASE CLICK HERE.

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.

SPONSORED BY   . 

To become a DocuWeeks sponsor, please call 213.534.3600.

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