The Foundation for Jewish Culture, whose mission is to "invest in creative individuals in order to nurture a vibrant and enduring Jewish identity, culture and community," recently granted $140,000 to five exemplary documentaries, ensuring their delivery to film festivals, television and other distribution outlets. The grants, which range between$20,000 and $35,000 each, will enable filmmakers to pay license fees for archival footage, complete additional shooting, and reach a wider audience through outreach and engagement strategies.

This year's grantees of the Foundation's Lynn and Jules Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Film include: Joann Sfar Draws From Memory (Dir./Prod.: Sam Ball; US/France), a portrait of one of France's most celebrated graphic novelists; Regarding Susan Sontag (Dir./Prod.: Nancy Kates; US), a spotlight on the life and work of the late American writer and icon; The Law in These Parts (Dir.: Ra'anan Alexandrowicz; Prod.: Laura Poitras; Israel/US), an examination of Israeli military tribunals in the Occupied Territories; Numbered (Dirs.: Dana Doron and Uriel Sinai; Israel), a meditation on the relationship between Holocaust survivors and their tattoos; and The Hangman (Dirs.:  Netalie Braun and Avigail Sperber; Israel), a chronicle of Adolf Eichmann's executioner.

The foundation received nearly 100 grant applications from around the world. Selected by a rigorous panel of scholars, critics, filmmakers and curators that included IDA's own executive director, Michael Lumpkin, the 2010 grantees reflect the global diversity of contemporary Jewish culture. Elise Bernhardt, president and CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Culture, said in a statement, "This year's films are notable for the extraordinary characters they follow and the passionate way in which they live their lives and follow their internal sense of what is right and true."

Since 1996, the Lynn and Jules Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Film has supported the completion of original documentaries that explore the Jewish experience in all its complexity. The fund was created with a lead grant from Steven Spielberg's Righteous Persons Foundation and sustained over 10 years with major support from the Charles H. Revson Foundation. The priority of the fund is to support projects that address significant subjects; offer fresh, challenging perspectives; engage audiences across cultural lines; and expand the understanding of Jewish experiences.

Foundation for Jewish Culture Board Member Lynn Kroll said in the statement, "The annual funding of works-in-progress is always an exciting risk. Jules and I were impressed with this year's submissions and grantees.  We are confident that the excellent and diverse panel of judges has made sound, informed recommendations.  I am particularly pleased that our challenge grant was matched by Ellen and Steve Susman, the Simms/Mann Family Foundation, Linda Platt, and others who share our belief in the power of documentary film to stimulate productive dialogue and debate."

In the past 14 years, documentary films supported by the Kroll Fund have received Academy Award nominations, Golden Globe Awards, Emmy Award Nominees, George Foster Peabody Awards, and prizes at festivals such as Berlin International Film Festival, Silverdocs, Sundance Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival. Past grantees include Waltz with Bashir, Budrus, Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, Crime After Crime, William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, Off and Running: An American Coming of Age Story, The Rape of Europa, among others.

Besides Michael Lumpkin, the panelists included Natan Meir, the Lorry I. Lokey Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University; Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR's Morning Edition, as well as the director of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes; cinematpographer John-Keith Wasson, whose credits include The Devil Came on Horseback, and Surviving Hitler: A Love Story; and Pamela Brown Lavitt, director of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival.

We are happy to announce the launch of IDA's Member Directory. Exclusively for IDA Members, the directory allows you to post  your profile, search member profiles and connect directly with other IDA members. Get listed today - it's a great way to connect with the documentary film community, promote your projects and network with like-minded folk!

To view the Member Directory, go to http://www.documentary.org/community/member-directory. The directory only displays members who have opted-in, so if you would like to be listed you must  be an IDA Member and opt-in.  Simply go to your profile settings (under edit profile), and select the "Share Profile in Member Directory" check-box.

Want to get listed but not an IDA member?  It's easy to join - simply visit the Membership page and follow the instructions!

The FCC came out with a net neutrality ruling December 20 that is a victory for the position enunciated by the International Documentary Association (IDA) and filed on a pro bono basis by entertainment attorney Michael C. Donaldson. Net neutrality is important to documentary filmmakers in that it ensures their films travel the Internet at the same speed as films by the major studios who can afford to pay for faster transport. The vote was 3-2.

Net neutrality regulations essentially state that the Internet service providers cannot pick and choose which items get preference as they travel the Internet; broadband providers will be prohibited from blocking access to lawful content. The new rules create two differing classes of service--one set of rules for fixed broadband networks and the other for wireless networks. The first rule requires providers be transparent in their management and operation of their networks; the second prohibits traffic blocking on the Internet; the last applies only to fixed broadband providers and prohibits discrimination against traffic on their network.  

 "An Internet that is not neutral could weaken, marginalize and eventually shut out the very work our community produces, as it is so often politically, socially and fiscally threatening to the corporate interests that control mainstream media and now seek to regulate the digital realm," said Eddie Schmidt, president of the IDA. "This hurts the community immeasurably, but it also hurts a global audience that relies on our work for hard news as well as valuable insights into the human condition." Michael C. Donaldson said, "This is far from  a complete victory, but a huge step forward for the documentary community."

Michael C. Donaldson organized the efforts on a pro bono basis, along with Jack I. Lerner and the USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic. The International Documentary Association led the fight, garnering support from organizations such as Film Independent, University Film & Video Association, Independent Filmmaker Project, Independent Feature Project Chicago, IFP Minnesota and National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture.

Top Photo: Left to right--IDA Board President Eddie Schmidt, Host Morgan Spurlock and IDA Executive Director Michael Lumpkin. Credit: A. Rodriquez/Getty Images.

Photos by Rene Lego

More Awards Photos by Meg Madison

In a week that began with IFP's Gothams in New York and continued with the Film Independent's Sprit nominations in Los Angeles, the 26^th edition of the IDA Documentary Awards brought things to a rousing crescendo at the jam-packed Directors Guild of America Theater.

Filmmaker and docu-funnyman Morgan Spurlock performed a second tour of duty as Awards Host, following his 2008 gig, with IDA Board President Eddie Schmidt joining Spurlock on stage for a few reconstituted scenes from some of the Feature nominees.  In what is probably the first instance of partial nudity in IDA Awards history, Spurlock and Schmidt sported towels for their Steam of Life routine, breaking into rollicking song 'n' dance about the travails of docmaking-and the towels, miraculously, stayed on. Then there was this Pinteresque interplay between two sheepherding cowboys from Sweetgrass: (long pause) "I guess we can make a documentary." (long pause) "It don't look all that hard." (long pause)

But the real theme of the evening was The Documentary Community, and with some of the best minds of the generation packed into the room Friday night, there was plenty to testify about. Joe Berlinger, discussing his very costly legal battle with Chevron and the IDA-led response to it, said, "...this experience has taught me that I am proud to be a part of this community and that the IDA can play a pivotal role in pushing our collective agenda forward...While we can debate whether or not it is easier or harder to be a documentarian today, I would argue that being a documentarian today has never been more important. ...We documentarians are one of the last bastions of independent journalism.  Whether those films show a bias or not, some of the most courageous and important reporting on real problems affecting all of us are being done by this community.  So, it's more important than ever to stick together and help each other and be thankful that we have the IDA to help further our very important mission.  Because of the tremendous good will that was shown to me, I intend to do my part to help however I can, and I hope you will too." 

And that seemed to set the tone for the rest of the evening. Walker, on collecting her second honor of the evening-Best Feature Documentary for Waste Land--remarked, "It's great to sit in a room with people who remind you of why you're doing this in  the first place." Laura Poitras, who earned the Humanitas Award for her film The Oath, noted, "We're thinking about this community as a movement." "It's a chance to meet all your heroes," said Donnet Award winner Jeff Malmberg. And Barbara Kopple, the Career Achievement Award honoree, exclaimed, "It's so vital and important to have a community such as this one."

Mark Jonathan Harris, the Preservation & Scholarship Award winner, talked about his love for teaching: "Teaching in the classroom reaffirms my faith in documentary. The experience is always rewarding... It's an adventure in engaging with new people and grappling with new ideas."

In addition to the Best Feature Award, Walker took home the previously announced Pare Lorentz Award for Waste Land, adding to the trove (landfill?) of honors that film has picked up this year since winning the Audience Award at Sundance. Among the other prizes, Kiran Deol's Woman Rebel took the Short Documentary Award, ESPN's 30 for 30 won the Continuing Series Award and Connie Field's Have You Heard from Johannesburg captured the Limited Series prize. For a complete run-down of the Awards, click here.

Here's a run-down of coverage of the IDA Awards:

Variety

Hollywood Reporter

IndieWire

The Wrap

Los Angeles Times

New York Times

UPI

About.com

AJ Schnack

This year's Preservation & Scholarship Award honoree, Mark Jonathan Harris, has taught filmmaking at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts since 1983. The award celebrates the impact Harris has made as a teacher and mentor--inspiring students, alumni and colleagues alike to make a difference in the documentary community. Harris, whose career has blended filmmaking, writing and teaching, is the first to maintain that he's more of a practitioner than a scholar. Indeed, when he graduated from Harvard, the last place he expected to land was academia. "I graduated from Harvard and fled academia," recalls Harris. "I wanted some experience with real life."

Harris' first foray into the real world was through journalism. He was fortunate enough to get a job at the famous--and now defunct--City News Service, a training ground for journalists in Chicago. His first job was covering crime in the South Side of Chicago from 5:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.

Harris then moved to the Associated Press, where he worked the night shift alongside Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who now writes for The New Yorker. Then and there, he realized he wasn't cut out to be an investigative journalist. "Sy was incredibly competitive," reflects Harris. "I would write one story, Sy would write two. I would write two stories, Sy would go out and write three. He was driven in a way that I wasn't. I was less interested in exposing people and getting the dirt, and more interested in trying to understand what makes people tick."

However, Harris did discover his love of film. When he got off work at 2:00 a.m., instead of going to a bar to unwind, he would go to a theater in downtown Chicago that showed a different double feature every night. "I slowly began to realize that I had fallen in love with film when I was at Harvard, and I thought this is really what I want to do," he says.

Harris got a job at a KGW-TV in Portland, Oregon, one of three television stations in the northwest owned by King Broadcasting Co., which was producing documentaries. He started out as a researcher and writer with a documentary unit. A few years later he moved to Seattle, where King had formed a separate documentary company, King Screen Productions. There, Harris met editor Richard Chew, A.C.E. (The Conversation; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Star Wars), director/cinematographer Richard Pearce (cinematography credits: Food, Inc.; Hearts and Minds; Woodstock), editor Arthur Coburn, A.C.E. (Monster, A Simple Plan), cinematographer Don Lenzer (Woodstock; Say Amen, Somebody; Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse) and filmmaker Trevor Greenwood (The Medium Is the Massage, You Know; The Redwoods), with whom he would later work at USC.

By 1970, King Screen Productions met with hard times and the filmmakers dispersed. After a stint in Montreal, Harris moved to Los Angeles and got a teaching job at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). To his surprise, he really enjoyed teaching, because it was all project-based. "I wasn't lecturing, but I was supervising students while they were making films," he says.

In 1983, Harris was hired at USC as an adjunct instructor to teach an evening course in Informational Film; two years later, he was hired full-time. "If I'm deserving of this award, I think that part of my contribution is that when I came to USC 25 years ago, there was really no documentary emphasis," says Harris. "And I started the Advanced Documentary Production Class along with Trevor Greenwood. What I'm most proud of is the fact that it has sustained itself over all these years."

From its inception, the Advanced Documentary Production Class has been team-taught by instructors who are also working professionals. Harris teaches directing; other components of the course include producing, editing, cinematography and sound. While the faculty has changed over the years, it's still very similar to the original course in that it is team-taught, and outside filmmakers are regularly brought in to screen their work. This is a way for students to be exposed to different forms of documentary filmmaking and get a taste of how to pursue a documentary career.

The USC School of Cinematic Arts doesn't have a separate documentary program and, in the first year, everybody takes the same basic introductory courses; students can choose to make documentary or narrative films. In the second and third years, students can concentrate on documentary or fiction--and most people move back and forth between the two. As Harris sees it, it's all about telling cinematic stories with compelling characters and a narrative arc. Many of his students have gone on to successful, award-winning careers. Matt Weiner focused on documentary while at USC and then went on to create Mad Men. Jeff Blitz worked in both fiction and documentary, then made the hit documentary Spellbound. And Lance Gentile, formerly an emergency room doctor, made a personal documentary while at USC and then went on to become one of the chief writers for E.R., for which he won an Emmy.

The documentary emphasis has been called "the hidden gem at USC," according to Harris, referring to a book comparing different film schools. The new facilities at USC look very fancy and grandiose, observes Harris, and the image of USC is "this Hollywood school," with names like Lucas, Spielberg and Zemeckis prominently visible on the buildings. But the faculty represents a great diversity, with many coming from independent fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, as well as from major Hollywood studios. For many students, the documentary emphasis has been an appealing alternative to Hollywood production. "The documentary program gets students out into the world and allows people to make films with more authority," says Harris. "It exposes students to the real world, to really important issues, or introduces them to worlds they otherwise wouldn't have access to."

Harris says he has also learned a tremendous amount about Los Angeles and its sub-cultures through his students' projects. "It's a wonderful window into the world of Los Angeles," he says. "I've learned so much about this city from all the films that my students have made."

In 2006, Harris and fellow USC professor Marsha Kinder established the Global Exchange Workshop, a cross-cultural exchange program with the Communications University of China (CUC) in Beijing. Each summer, six students from CUC collaborate with six USC students to make short documentaries about Los Angeles and Beijing. The workshop alternates between China and Los Angeles. Not only has the program produced a number of prize-winning films, but it has fostered long-term collaborative relationships.

Harris' impact extends beyond academia. USC alumni and faculty alike comprise a large percentage of the documentary community in Los Angeles. Harris attributes this representation to a strong spirit of camaraderie and collaboration, and an ongoing effort to expose students to networking and work possibilities. Additionally, instructors in the documentary course are all working filmmakers and often hire current and former students to work for them. Harris says he makes it a practice to hire at least one current or former student on each production. And of course Doculink, the online and face-to-face community for documentary filmmakers, was started by USC alumni Robert Bahar and Antonia Kao, who wanted to find a way to continue supporting one another once out of school.

As a testament to the strength of the USC program, not only do alumni go back to screen films and/or works-in-progress for students, they also return to teach. Lisa Leeman (One Lucky Elephant, Who Needs Sleep?) teaches a producing component; Ted Braun (Darfur Now) teaches screenwriting and script analysis, and Bahar (Made in LA) returned recently as a guest lecturer and has also taught producing.

But Harris reflects on the power of the documentary courses for all students, not just those who have gone on to high-profile filmmaking careers. "I'm proud of the students who have passed through the course--whether they end up becoming successful filmmakers or not," he maintains. "It's an honor to receive this award. I think the experience has been meaningful to a lot of people, and it remains meaningful to me. And as long as I find meaning in it, I suspect my students will, too."

Laura Almo is a contributing editor at Documentary. She can be reached at lauraalmo@mac.com.

As reality programming proliferates and cop and family dramas remain meat-and-potatoes staples on the television menu, it may be hard for some to wrap their minds around a time when this was not the case. Emmy and Academy Award-winning filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond remember, though, because they were there on the frontlines and ushered in a filmmaking and storytelling style that changed documentaries and the television landscape forever. 

If that claim seems a bit too dramatic, rest assured that it can most definitely be backed by the Raymonds' amazing body of work--both under the banner of their company, Video Vérité, which they formed more than 30 years ago, and in the early years of their career.

While attending film school at New York University, Alan worked for Drew Associates, where he was responsible for synching the films before the double system was perfected, and he watched and learned from Robert Drew, Albert Maysles, Richard Leacock and DA Pennebaker. After graduating, he went to work for an independent production company in Chicago, Mike Shea Films. At that time, Susan was an undergraduate at DePaul University; the two met and married in 1966 and then moved to New York. Their professional and personal lives have been intertwined ever since.

Together they've made many award-winning documentaries on important tent-pole subjects such as crime, literacy, the educational system, children, religion and war that have aired on PBS, HBO, BBC and ABC News. But none of their projects has had quite the impact of An American Family, a 12-part PBS documentary series that aired in 1973 and that focused on the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California. Somewhat shocking material at that time, the series drew record audiences for PBS and major media attention, and the Louds became some of the first reality show celebrities. 

"This was really the first time a television show took on a dysfunctional family, and Lance Loud [the eldest son of Pat and Bill Loud] was one of the first openly gay people ever to appear on television--that was somewhat controversial," says Alan, who spent seven months filming the series, along with Susan, who handled the sound. "Remember, this was a time when there were only three broadcast networks and PBS."  

In his book An American Family: A Televised Life, author Jeffrey Ruoff describes the series as using an "episodic, multiple-focus structure common to soap operas. The first episode introduces the seven members of the Loud family and the central story line, and the next 11 programs follow their activities in the summer and fall of 1971." The filmmakers traveled to New York with Lance, and captured the beginning of the end of the Louds' marriage when Pat asked Bill for a divorce. The relationship between producer Craig Gilbert and the Raymonds also grew acrimonious--they're still not on speaking terms--but working on this series became a project that would be part of their legacy.

An American Family remains a seminal nonfiction series and prototype of the fictional family dramas, prompting TV Guide to designate it as the original reality TV series and one of the "50 Greatest TV Shows" of all time. Even Matt Groening, creator of the long-running The Simpsons, called the series an influence. "We want to believe we helped create Homer Simpson, but we do feel that we changed the family dynamic that moved very far away from Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show and definitely introduced more of a confessional type of television to American audiences," says Susan.

After An American Family, the Raymonds launched Video Vérité, and in 1976, made The Police Tapes, a groundbreaking documentary that captured the daily lives of cops in the high-crime area of the South Bronx. "We were riding and shooting in the back seat of the cop car at a time when this wasn't allowed because there was a blue line of silence, and most cops didn't trust the media," Susan explains. "No one had seen this kind of footage before, but now these shots are a staple of television."

At that time, PBS only showed the documentary locally on WNET, telling the Raymonds that it wasn't up to PBS' technical standards. "But we always felt like they didn't want to encourage this kind of documentary filmmaking and reporting by people like ourselves, who were using this inexpensive equipment that would then and now democratize and level the playing field of filmmaking," Alan notes.  The Police Tapes was later acquired by ABC News and went on to win Primetime Emmy Awards, a Columbia duPont Award and a George Foster Peabody Award. The film also inspired Steven Bochco when he created Hill Street Blues, which, in turn, inspired the long-running series COPS.

The Raymonds later received an Academy Award nomination for their 1991 film Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House, and then, in 1994, won an Oscar for their feature documentary I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School, which followed a year in the life of a troubled inner-city school in North Philadelphia. The couple moved with their son to Philadelphia in 2000 and made it their home base. That year, they won another Emmy Award for Children in War, a documentary they made for HBO, and they also wrote a companion book that was published by Harper Collins.

In the late 1990s, the Raymonds traveled to Bosnia three times during the war, as well as to Rwanda, Israel and Northern Ireland. And like in most of their other films, they worked as independent filmmakers in these countries. "In retrospect, it probably wasn't the wisest decision for both of us, as parents, to travel to these war-torn countries," Susan admits. "It's very demanding logistically--and as parents--to make these type of year-in-the-life films, but that's the life we have chosen."

Their film The Congregation, which aired on PBS in 2004, was a portrait of a progressive Methodist church in Philadelphia, which allowed them to actually work from home and live a "normal" family life. Years earlier, in the fall of 2001, Lance Loud asked the Raymonds to make a film of the final year of his life. He had been living with HIV for many years and then was diagnosed with an HIV/Hepatitis C co-infection and entered hospice care, where he died at age 50 in December 2001 in Los Angeles. Interviewed for an article in the December 2002/January 2003 Documentary, Susan spoke of their relationship with Lance and how emotionally involved they were with him and the film. As Alan said, "You sit there at the Avid watching the footage, and you start to cry." 

The Raymonds had already produced An American Family Revisited: The Louds Ten Years Later, which aired on HBO in 1983. Lance Loud! A Death in An American Family aired on PBS in 2003, marking the 30th anniversary of the historic series and a milestone in the Raymonds' lives as well.

Alan notes, "Every time we screen a film with Sheila Nevins at HBO, she always prefaces it by saying, ‘I don't know how you two can be married and work together.' But we really do trust each other, like to be together and still enjoy each other's company."  Early on as newlyweds, they decided that working together was much better for them as a couple. Alan had taken a job at Bill Jersey's Quest Productions and began working on a film about the 1968 US presidential election.  "Alan was off on the election trail and never home, and that wasn't how we wanted to live," Susan says. "For us, the shooting of the film is the fun part--and we wanted to share the work and not have to leave one behind while shooting on location. It was one of those ‘If you can't fight them, join them' kind of situations." 

Susan went on the road on the campaign film, started out as a grip and then worked her way into sound, while Alan became a producer. Gilbert then hired them to work at PBS, where they became a camera-and-sound team and worked on documentaries like The Triumph of Christy Brown, which aired in 1970 on WNET. 

"I'm not sure I could work with anyone else other than Susan in terms of making our films," Alan maintains. "Certainly some of the films favor one or the other of us in terms of subject matter. She is very passionate about making the film we're working on now about dyslexia, and I was crazy about making Elvis '56 [1987], but compromise isn't really in our vocabulary and we have made films our way."

 "If we hadn't been so stubborn, we may have been further down the line," Susan adds. "But we have fought for our vision." She has retired from doing sound after being injured carrying the equipment during production on Children in War, but they keep making films. In 2008, they produced Hard Times at Douglass High for HBO, which profiled a historically black high school in West Baltimore. 

The Raymonds were recently interviewed for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' Archive of American Television, and many of their films are in the permanent collections of the Paley Center for Media, the Museum of Modern Art and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. 

Now, a whole new generation of viewers will be able to experience An American Family through an HBO feature about the making of the series titled Cinema Vérité. The film, which was shot this past summer, stars Tim Robbins and Diane Lane as Bill and Pat Loud, with Thomas Dekker as Lance and James Gandolfini as Craig Gilbert. Directed by Sheri Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who made the critically acclaimed feature film American Splendor, Cinema Vérité will show the tension between Gilbert and the Raymonds, who will be played by Patrick Fugit and Shanna Collins. "There has always been Craig's version, the Louds' version and our take on the making of this film, and they're often not in-sync," Alan explains. "And while the other two have spoken out, we have remained mum."  

The Raymonds did serve as consultants on this movie, giving notes on several drafts of the script, spending a few days on the set in a home in Tarzana, California, and instructing some of the actors about how filmmakers work.

In a bit of odd synchronicity, their new film for HBO, Journey into Dyslexia, is tentatively scheduled to air in May 2011, the same month that Cinema Vérité premieres. "It's an out-of-body experience," Alan admits. "We spent a lot of time with the actors playing us. To the extent we were able to influence it, we did; but ultimately it's a work of fiction and really a new interpretation of the filming of this landmark documentary series."

Shelley Gabert is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film and television, culture and travel.

On the first day of her shoot at the Harlan County (Kentucky) coal miners strike, Barbara Kopple and her crew were met with distrust. The miners were under threat from a company whose recklessness with their safety had gone unchecked for years. On top of that, the company had gotten crafty, hiring scabs and bullies to menace the strikers and placing spies on the picket line. When Kopple and her crew introduced themselves, the strikers gave them fake names. "They said they were Martha Washington or Florence Nightingale, but they left a door open," Kopple recalls. " ‘If you come tomorrow at 4:00 a.m. and be on the picket line...' So we went up this mountain to find a place to stay, and we got up at 3:30."

The next morning, it was raining and the mountain road they travelled down lacked side rails; it's a dangerous situation if you know the mountain, but if you don't, anxieties are even higher. A car sped by the crew and Kopple's car toppled over into a ditch. "Everybody was fine," she says. "We got out of the car and dragged out the equipment. We knew we had to go to the picket line, so we walked. Harlan is small and news traveled and when everyone heard, they put their arms around us and embraced us and that was the start of something very special."

What was special, Kopple seems to suggest, was not the Academy Award for Best Documentary that Harlan County, U.S.A. won in 1977, or the respect it earned in the industry, but the relationships she and the crew built with the miners. It was her integration into the community that this documentarian seems to value most. 

Kopple got her start interning with Albert and David Maysles. Fresh off a course of study in clinical psychology, she came to New York and took a single class in cinéma vérité at the New School. One of the women in her class was the secretary at the Maysles Brothers' production house and told her that they needed an intern. "I was hired and I never went back to that class," Kopple says. What followed were stints as assistant editor working with Barbara Jarvis and then Larry Moyer, after which Kopple, like many socially minded documentarians of that era, made a film as part of a collective.

The collective, called Winter Film Collective, made one film together: Winter Soldier. "Vets coming out of Vietnam came to see us and we chose pieces of their interviews for the film," she reflects. "A woman donated a home in New Jersey and we all lived there, different people cooked. We were a collective but we weren't philosophically bound. Instead, our interest was showing you who these vets were." She adds, "Activism is a big word."

Kopple is known for her interest in social issues. While her attention to the Dixie Chicks' struggle with censorship in her and Cecilia Peck's 2006 film Shut Up and Sing "hints at a larger political issue," and her 1990 doc American Dream looks at a labor strike that pitted brother against brother, she emphasizes that her first priority is connecting with her subjects: "When you're with people for long periods of time, you're filming because there's a trust and a chemistry. Once they allow you in their world, it's wonderful--and that's what wonderful films are about."

This non-invasive tack leads to a clear but quiet politic. Kopple identifies that the goal is to "go with it. It's not as if I wouldn't plan [for a shoot], but you have to stick with the subjects. You just have to be there to take that on. If you do a film with an agenda, then it's just what's in your head and it's not really what's going on. You have to be loyal to the reality." And what loyalty to reality ultimately requires is a constant attention to the people you're filming.

Though Kopple's footage is commonly eye-catching, shooting itself is not always thrilling. "Lots of the time, not much is happening," she admits. "You're cooking or telling stories or playing music--that's what our lives are. Sometimes big things happen. Every project sort of brings with it surprises and unexpected turns." Clearly this kind of involvement in the everyday elements of her subjects' lives helps build the subject/filmmaker chemistry, and also lends to a feeling of greater proximity and access.

The sense of a cinematic backstage pass that informs Wild Man Blues, the 1998 doc on Woody Allen's sideline career as a Dixieland clarinet player, not only personalizes the cultural icon but softens his public persona in the wake of his messy divorce from actress Mia Farrow and his new marriage to Farrow's previously adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. Were it not for her inclusive and necessarily neutral vantage, her subjects might not have trusted the filmmaker to shoot them. Muckraking would be a major obstacle to her goals, and frankly she doesn't need to seek out that brand of material; if you're ready, she suggests, it'll come to you. "I didn't know we were going to be machine gunned [in Kentucky]," she explains. "I didn't know when we were driving around with an organizer that we'd find out a miner had been killed. You just have to be there and be ready."

When Kopple found her way to the Dixie Chicks, it was partly because they seemed unlikely characters for debate and partly because their friendships and openness stood out so prominently. "The film touches on issues like free speech and the war in Iraq, but it's about these three beautiful women you'd never expect such controversy to happen to," Kopple maintains. "The situation became very politicized and the singers chose to not apologize and to stick to what they believe in. I connected with them through their friendship and caring for each other. If we have girlfriends in our lives that cared for us like that, it'd be fantastic."

Of late, Kopple's pupils are making a splash. "I taught one semester at NYU and my class was incredible: Lucy Walker, Brett Morgen, Nanette Bernstein--they were all my students. They weren't lucky to train under me; it's me who was lucky, and they've done such wonderful things both for me and in their careers." Walker went on to make Blindsight, Devil's Playground and the IDA Award-nominated Waste Land. Morgen and Bernstein's credits as a team include the Academy Award-nominated On the Ropes, as well as The Kid Stays in the Picture; Morgen later directed Chicago 10, and Bernstein made American Teen.

When asked about Bernstein's recent foray into fiction (the romantic comedy Going the Distance), Kopple says, "It's great: I did the same [her 2005 drama Havoc]. We all need ways to express ourselves. When you work with docs, you're always seeking what's real, and that's what comes out when you shoot fiction; you have an instinct and a pulse for that." Fiction, in this way, is a training ground for the doc aesthetic. "The film that inspired me most toward documentary was Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers. It wasn't a doc, but it was shot like one. You felt it was really happening and you were on the inside of it. It unfolded in small ways that made it feel so real."

Kopple says that, as new technologies have made filmmaking a more accessible form, the documentary community has been able to enjoy "a great diversity of storytelling--the past, family, personal stories. We need all of this to be able to continue in independent films. We can't become complacent; we need to let more and more people in to tell their stories. It's going to make us closer and help us understand each other."

Looking back, Kopple cites titles like Peter Davis' Hearts and Minds, Bill Jersey's A Time for Burning and Michael Moore's Roger and Me as inspirations. "I'm moved by docs that give a voice to the voiceless or tell a different side of a story than we thought we knew," she maintains. "By telling stories in a compassionate and compelling way, you can inspire others to act. When you do that, a hidden issue emerges and that comes to the forefront of our consciousness--and with that you can compel people and even inspire the mainstream media to open their eyes and respond." This is precisely what she's done, but not by casual means. To her obliquely activist statement, she adds that docs can affect audiences mightily--"If you make the film well, that is."

Sara Vizcarrando runs the Review Section at Boxoffice Magazine, manages the Opening Movies at Rottentomatoes.com and teaches film studies at DeAnza College.

The long-awaited Short List of feature-length documentaries in consideration for Academy Award nomination was finally released, and here are the lucky 15:

• Client 9:The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Dir.: Alex Gibney; ES Productions LLC)
• Enemies of the People (Dirs.: Rob Lemkin, Thet Sambath; Old Street Films)
• Exit through the Gift Shop (Dir.: Banksy; Paranoid Pictures)
• Gasland (Dir.: Josh Fox; Gasland Productions, LLC)
• Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (Dirs.: Michele Hozer, Peter Raymont; White Pine Pictures)
• Inside Job (Dir.: Charles Ferguson; Representational Pictures)
• The Lottery (Dir.: Madeleine Sackler; Great Curve Films)
• Precious Life (Dir.: Shlomi Eldar; Origami Productions)
• Quest for Honor (Dir.: Mary Ann Smothers Bruni; Smothers Bruni Productions)
• Restrepo (Dirs.: Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger; Outpost Films)
• This Way of Life (Dir.: Thomas Burstyn; Cloud South Films)
• The Tillman Story (Dir.: Amir Bar-Lev; Passion Pictures/Axis Films)
• Waiting for ‘Superman' (Dir.: Davis Guggenheim; Electric Kinney Films)
• Waste Land (Dir.: Lucy Walker; Almega Projects)
• William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe (Dirs.: Emily Kunstler, Sarah Kunstler; Disturbing the Universe LLC)

The final five, along with three to five films from the Documentary Short Subject Short List, will be announced Tuesday, January 25, 2011.

Quest for Honor, This Way of Life and Waste Land all qualified for Academy Award consideration this past summer through IDA's DocuWeeks Theatrical Documentary Showcase, joining the shorts Killing in the Name (Dir./Prod.: Jed Rothstein; Prods.: Liz Garbus, Rory Kennedy) and Sun Come Up (Dir./Prod.: Jennifer Redfearn; Prod.: Tim Metzger) among the DocuWeeks alums.

The Features List is an interesting array of unintended parings: two films that feature Eliot Spitzer (Client 9 and Inside Job); two films about the state of education in America, both of which feature reform advocate Geoffrey Canada (The Lottery and Waiting for ‘Superman'); two films about the War in Afghanistan (Restrepo and The Tillman Story);  and two--well, make that three--films about iconoclastic artists and their distinctive negotiations through their respective arts industries (Exit Through the Gift Shop, Genius Within, Waste Land).  Among the omissions: The Oath, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, 12^th & Delaware, Marwencol, Sweetgrass, La Danse, Boxing Gym.

The Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2010 will be presented on Sunday, February 27, 2011, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, and televised live on ABC. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 200 countries worldwide.

Editor's Note: Cool It comes out March 29 on DVD through Lionsgate.

The latest documentary contribution to the climate change debate is Cool It, an adaptation of Bjørn Lomborg's controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Whereas Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth tells us to be afraid about the impending apocalypse, Cool It makes a somewhat schizophrenic, if not reassuring, counter-argument: Climate change may not be as bad as we think, but even if it is, there are some compelling solutions. Cool It also picks up where Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold's 2007 doc Everything's Cool left off--at the heart of the struggle of scientists and journalists to capture the public imagination and draw our collective attention to the need to take action.

But where these earlier films stress the importance of carbon reduction and individual responsibility, Cool It operates under the assumption that it is unrealistic and perhaps unfair to expect society to lower its consumption, especially in the "developing" economies of China and India. Lomborg instead puts forth a two-pronged approach: First, we must look at climate change in the context of systemic problems like disease and malnutrition and address those problems simultaneously; second, we must invest in solutions, high- and low-tech, that will combat global warming in the most cost-efficient manner.

While some viewers may disagree with the underlying assumptions of the film--that global warming projections have been exaggerated to create fear and that we can solve climate change in large part through investing in new technology--the film's focus on presenting concrete solutions should mollify, to some extent, even the most skeptical.

Cool It is a collaboration between Lomborg, Interloper Films, 1019 Entertainment and Roadside Attractions and is opening in theaters around the country on November 12. We spoke with director/producer/co-writer Ondi Timoner about experiences making the film.

IDA: What inspired you to make this film, and what were your concerns?

Ondi Timoner: I was approached to make the film, and I didn't know much about climate change at the time. Beyond An Inconvenient Truth and a few newspaper articles, I really hadn't focused on it, but I was concerned as a mother of a five-year-old at the time. I had to remind myself, as I was feeling overwhelmed with the subject matter, that the reason why I love documentaries is because I get to learn so much.

So I decided to meet with Bjørn Lomborg for what I thought would be breakfast, and it turned into a five-hour session. Because of his reputation I was definitely not going to sign onto this without guaranteeing that this guy was legitimate and worth supporting. I left there feeling that he was a font of information, and that his perspective was really interesting. I realized that the fact that I don't know a lot about this, and that I need it explained and broken down, may actually make me the perfect person for this job, because I would know how to make it relatable to audiences.

He had me convinced by the end that we need to investigate why we are just attacking climate change when there are two billion people without clean drinking water in the world, and there are people dying needlessly of malaria. If we're going to spend $250 billion on Kyoto, and $250 billion of our GDP on cutting carbon, we could actually be curing all people who are dying needlessly of malaria at the same time. And these are the people that are most vulnerable to climate change.

I was sensitive to not getting in bed with the Republicans on this film, and I wanted to really make sure that this wasn't going to be some kind of right-wing propaganda film. But at the same time, if [Al] Gore is going to call this the greatest moral issue of our time, is that really accurate? Or is it a huge moral issue that so many people live below the poverty line and die needlessly from disease, while we live in relative luxury? That seems to me to be a huge moral issue as well.

I also felt like the controversy around Bjørn was sort of directly related to why we don't have a lot of alternative energy solutions now--it's because of financial interests and political interests that silence ideas that aren't part of whatever they're trying to get financed.

For example, somebody that we interviewed is an engineer who invented wave energy in 1973. It got shut down by the energy council in the UK because the council is controlled by the nuclear people, and the nuclear people wanted the financing for themselves. As a result, we don't have wave energy. And that was kind of like what I felt was happening to Bjørn, with him being called a "parasite" and a "scourge."

IDA: As a filmmaker, what were your biggest challenges in adapting a book into a documentary, and what do you think the film accomplishes that the book perhaps doesn't?

OT: Well, a film needs to be entertaining, first and foremost. It has to move, it has to flow. It's got to build an argument, and it's got to let that up and go into another. It's got to be like a song. It's got to have dynamics. So, that was the real challenge: How do I bring this to life?

It was also very important to Bjørn and to the producers that we discuss some of the worst-case scenarios that were laid out in An Inconvenient Truth and how they may not be as extreme--we might not be facing the end of the world tomorrow. And I thought, how do I go about taking something that's pretty much the Bible when it comes to climate change, and get audiences to have an open mind about it, and also calm them down so they could then think about solutions?

So my approach to the film was to, first of all, lay out who this character is who's going to be our guide into this very heavy world. Let's show all sides. Let's empower the audience. We show the card and say, "This is the guy. He's going to be accused of scientific dishonesty; here are the battles he's fought."

And then we get into the fact that for 18 years we've had climate conferences and nothing's been done. Why? Well, there's only one single solution that's being offered and it's not anything anybody can conceive of actually doing. That's not working, right? It's broken. The definition of insanity is attempting to do the same thing again and again and expecting a different result, right? So it's a little bit crazy and there's been a lot of money going around with climate negotiators and mediators, etc. But we the people aren't getting the full picture.

Bjørn's most compelling argument was that the reason we don't switch out fossil fuels now is because alternative energy is too expensive. We're not going to stop heating our homes or cooling our homes or taking airplanes. We're not going to stop these modern conveniences, and we can't ask China and India, who are coming out of poverty, to stop either, until it's just less expensive to use solar or wind or nuclear or algae or whatever.

Bjørn says that's just not going to happen, and I thought, Well, that makes perfect sense. Why is everyone saying, Cut carbon now? We should be saying, Pay a carbon tax right now, $0.06 at the gas pump. If we did a $7 per metric ton carbon tax, we'd raise $273 billion annually, and we could actually apply that money towards making the solutions viable faster.

To me the solutions were by far the most intriguing part. I thought, What's going to be exciting here is going and seeing all of the things that we are doing that can be done. All the scientists who are on the brink of solving this issue need R&D money to know what the repercussions of their inventions are going to be, so that they can speed the process of making them viable.

I wanted to really empower audiences with the knowledge of what is going on out there and that we're really just at the tip of the iceberg of all the solutions to climate change. And there are adaptation solutions. Cooling a city, for example, can be as easy as painting the streets a lighter color, and the rooftops a lighter color, and adding trees and adding water features. That can bring down the temperature ten degrees Fahrenheit. We could do that in all of these urban heat pockets in the world for a billion dollars.

I tried to break it down into three categories: geo-engineering, adaptation and alternative energy solutions. And then I challenged Bjørn. I said I'll make the film, but you need to leave the audience with a budget of exactly how you propose this money should be spent. And go see kids in the developing world, and kids in a school in England who are measuring their carbon. See what the different concerns are through the eyes of the children. That wasn't in the book, but it's in the movie.

IDA: I haven't read the book, but it seems like the film is more solutions-oriented than the book. Is that accurate?

OT: Yeah, exactly. I constantly had to push Bjørn. Bjørn is a contrarian by nature. He fights against, and he argues against, and he debates and debates. And I wanted the film to really have a life of its own and take us to places we've never been.

IDA: The title of the film, Cool It, does suggest that we as a society might be overreacting to climate change, or at least, reacting to it in an overly dramatic, the-world-is-coming-to-an-end kind of way. Are you concerned that people might use the film to undermine the call for individual and collective action?

OT: That's definitely a concern of mine, but it's not at all my intention. I didn't choose the title of the movie, and I wanted to steer away from it, and constantly did. I didn't have final cut, but the film still follows my structure.

I really wanted to not start with attacking An Inconvenient Truth upfront. I felt like that was a really bad move. Gore's contribution in bringing this issue to our consciousness is really important, and can't be diminished. The whole aspect of saying "It's not that bad, don't be scared" --that's a Bjørn thing. He thinks that the fear is really paralyzing people from actually doing something. I don't know that I agree with that. The film is a collaboration; it couldn't just be me. I probably would have minimized that section even more in the film.

What I learned was that we have absolutely no idea what's going to happen. The sky could fall tomorrow. Antarctica, Greenland, could disintegrate in the next year. The UN climate panel is the main body that we all rely on for that data, and Bjørn states what the findings of that panel are in the film. They say it's not going to be 20 feet of sea level rise, it's supposed to be one to three feet by the end of the century, and we can deal with this.

But I'm reluctant to say what's going to happen, or what's not going to happen. And I don't think that should be the focus, and I hope that's not the takeaway of the film. That we have to do something about it is something that we all agree on, or not all of us--maybe there are some Tea Party members who don't agree, but most rational human beings understand that climate change is real, man-made, and also not man-made. It's also just cyclical, and the way the world goes.

But one thing that we have as human beings that the dinosaurs didn't have, is reason, and technology, and science, and our brains. We caused the acceleration of this process, and we need to apply our minds to stopping it. We need to finance those great minds that are working to solve this problem. It's not whether or not things are going to get worse faster or slower; they're getting worse.

I'm a Democrat, but for me, the polarization of the issue is a huge part of the problem,. But I would never want the film to be used as a vehicle for stopping things. I hope that it causes us to say, "Well, why isn't this stuff happening right now? Let's get it going!"

IDA: It's interesting to hear you talk about An Inconvenient Truth and that your preference would have been to not emphasize the critique of that film as much.

OT: I did a lot of fighting to make it not a focus and I pushed it back in the film, 20, 30 minutes back, whereas other people involved in the film wanted it right upfront. I said, "There's no way you can just go ahead and take this guy from Denmark, who most people haven't heard of in America, and say, ‘OK, he's going to be your new Al Gore; listen to him. We're going to tell you how Al Gore exaggerated.' You're going to have everybody getting up and walking out of the movie theater."

You've got to say who this guy is, show where he comes from, really get into him as a character and lay out the whole landscape before you start getting into An Inconvenient Truth. Those are powerful images, seeing Florida and New York under water. I think it's important that we know that the science doesn't support that right now.

IDA: As a viewer, even though I did see An Inconvenient Truth and was holding it up, I thought it was interesting to introduce that skepticism and remind us that just because we're being presented with facts by Al Gore, that doesn't mean that everything is true. But then my response was also, Should I be viewing this movie with the same skepticism? I wanted to just go along for the ride, but at the end, I wasn't sure in which version of the truth to believe.

OT: Well, here's my advice to you: Don't believe any of it. Just believe and understand the one thing that everybody agrees on: there's a problem. And do believe this: Since 1992 our leaders have been meeting around the world and coming up with no agreement, and that is a fact. Those who did agree on Kyoto didn't really do it. The only agreement that has been reached is EU 2020, and that has been extremely inefficient.

Our film doesn't say, "You shouldn't do something." It's just that An Inconvenient Truth, as powerful as it is, and was, doesn't leave us with any solutions beyond changing our light bulbs, and so it's overwhelming; it's totally terrifying.

I think like any powerful bright light or comet, there's a vacuum behind it, and I was hoping that this film would fill that vacuum and empower audiences to say, "OK. There are all these amazing solutions out there that are being developed, and we need to get those to the marketplace faster. We need to do something about this." And unfortunately, and I pushed Bjørn on this, we can't do anything as individuals. We need to actually do it as a group. We need to do it on a macro level. We need to push our politicians and start saying, "Hey, we don't mind a carbon tax. Don't be terrified, we'll still vote for you." Most of us can afford that. But almost none of us can afford to switch to alternative energy right now because it's too expensive. We all need to get together and do something here.

IDA: I really did appreciate how much of the film was focused on systems-thinking and presenting solutions. But seeing the part with Hollywood celebrities, talking about all these little eco-friendly things they're doing, it did seem to be poo-pooing that kind of individual action and portraying it as a bit of a fad. Is there still a role for the reduction of individual consumption? The assumption the film presents is that we're all going to keep riding planes and that we need all of the modern conveniences that we have. It seems like there might be some middle ground where we do also have to make individual compromises.

OT: I pushed that as well. I had to remind Bjørn to say, "By all means, do these things." But they don't represent a huge part of the reduction. There was a journalist in England who set out to zero his carbon, and he managed to cut it in one year down by 20 percent. And he had totally changed his life; he didn't drive a car anymore, he never took an airplane, his family was probably going to kill him. By the end of it, they said, "Congratulations! What are going to do to celebrate?" And he said, "I've got the whole family tickets to Jamaica." And in that one move of flying to Jamaica, he cancelled everything he'd done.

So there's this unfortunate reality that we need to figure out on a much bigger level. For example, how we power our airplanes. That's why the algae part of the film is pretty cool. The fact that NASA is focusing on that is heartening. We need to figure out how to power our lives, because we're not going to stop doing these things.

But yeah, I recycle, I change light bulbs to more energy-efficient light bulbs, I turn off all the lights and try to unplug things. Everyone should still do that. It's not about, "Oh, let's just waste some more because, hell, it's not going to make a difference." I really hope that's not what people understand from this film. They need to understand,That's not going to solve the problem. We've got to do more than that, and we've got to do it now.

And we've got to not forget about the people that are suffering and dying needlessly in the developing world, because they are the ones most vulnerable to climate change. They're the ones that don't have any ability to irrigate or survive or weather the storm, especially when half the family is dying of some disease that's poverty-based. I do take issue with the statement that climate change is the greatest moral issue of our time. I understand that it is one great moral issue, but it should be addressed hand-in-hand with other issues. I really did like that about Bjørn's argument.

IDA: Well, I did think that the budget that he outlines in the film is really compelling, and how $250 billion could solve not only climate change but also other very pressing issues around health and education. So I was wondering whether that proposed budget has actually been officially presented to the EU or to any other governmental body and if so, how did they respond?

OT: I don't think so. I think it's basically been outlined in this film and the film is just coming out now, and a lot of action will happen in the wake of it. We've got our hands full just finishing a film this complex in just a year!

IDA: In addition to the theatrical release, are you planning to do any kind of outreach campaign with schools, or governments or nonprofits?

OT: I know that the website is hopefully going to be a center for a lot of these ideas. Bjørn has talked about how awesome it would be, sort of like what [Bill and Melinda] Gates do, to have the top 50 solutions chosen and then finance all of them at some expense. And even if most of them fail and a few succeed, then we've done great. It'll be very exciting to see where the conversation goes from here and what happens, and hopefully it doesn't stay just a conversation.

IDA: What about you personally? Do you think you'll continue to explore environmental issues in your filmmaking?

OT: Maybe. I've done the collision of art and commerce with Dig!. I've done the prison system with The Nature of the Beast, and I'm actually just starting to talk with Robert Downey Jr. about doing a project with prisons. It will be about transitioning inmates out of prison in a very innovative way. I've always been very interested in that issue--whether or not our prison system actually rehabilitates people and how we transition people back into the world so that they don't return to prison. And that's an important financial issue for all of us, too. It's really expensive keeping so many people in prison, and we're not turning them into productive citizens most of the time.

I did Join Us, which is about four families that leave a church that they believe actually might be a cult and they check into the only accredited cult-treatment center to be deprogrammed. The clinic breaks down the techniques of mind-control, which actually applies across many issues like the "war on terror."

And then I made We Live in Public, which is about the Internet's effect on our lives, and now Cool It, about climate change. I like the fact that I am sending up lots of different subjects. Quite selfishly, it's my way of learning, too. So I'm not an environmentalist who came to this project. I'm a filmmaker and a storyteller first and foremost and, if something moves me, I may get into that.

If I did another film about the environment, I would focus on water. I shot a documentary that I completed a short film on--there's definitely a feature there--about a dam in Africa that was cutting off the oldest living civilization in sub-Saharan Africa from water and about the African Development Bank, which is tied in with the World Trade Organization. Once again, it's an example of financial interests taking people and their lives. Even a UN Heritage site, the Great Mosque of Djenné, all of that is just flying down the proverbial river because of the $26 million they could get.

Water is going to be the major issue. It's amazing that we have lived on this planet for so long and all of the scientists haven't yet figured out a way to turn seawater into drinkable water--and we're going to run out of water!

But right now I'm transitioning into doing what I like to call "pre-scripted actor films." I don't like to call them "dramatic" or "narratives" because I'd like to think that most of my films are dramatic and have narratives.

I'm making a film right now about Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer. So I'm going back in the direction of art and stretching my wings by making a film with actors and a script. I'm working with the Sundance Institute, and it looks like James Franco might star as Robert Mapplethorpe.

Shira Golding is a filmmaker and graphic designer currently working on a documentary about renewable energy in Ithaca, NY, as well as a peak oil musical called We Can't Stop. www.shirari.com

The Film Independent Filmmaker Forum, held this past Hallowe'en weekend at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles, offered a weekend's worth of food for thought for doc- and fiction-makers alike.

A perennial in-demand panel, Find Money for your Documentary, moderated by Caroline Libresco of the Sundance Institute, went beyond the usual areas of grant-writing and pitching to cover such areas as packaging, as presented by Dina Kuperstock from the agency CAA, and equity financing, a bailiwick of Impact Partners' Dan Cogan. Executive producer Stephen Nemeth (Climate Refugees; Fuel, Flow) weighed in with his tales of financing through his company, Rhino Entertainment; Karim Ahmad of ITVS represented the public sector, and representing the new kid on the block, the wildly anticipated Oprah Winfrey Network and its Oprah Winfrey Doc Club, was Jeff Meier, OWN's senior vice president of scheduling, acquisitions and Strategy.   

Kuperstock likes documentaries that have crossover potential into other platforms and ancillary markets, and cited RJ Cutler's The September Issue as a high-concept film that would attract CAA's attention.  Meier, whose OWN launches January 1, admitted that despite the formidable Oprah brand behind it, documentary is a genre that's "ratings challenged." What he and OWN are looking for are "personal stories-not necessarily cause-related or political documentaries, but documentaries that illuminate an issue through a personal story." Meier added that Oprah "wants to change ways that docs are marketed."  OWN had originally set out to acquire docs, but now they also finance projects from the beginning, and acquire about a dozen docs a year.

Nemeth, who is also in production on docs about the writers George Plimpton and Budd Schulberg and the board game Monopoly, declared himself "a terribly optimistic pessimist." In raising both recoupable and non-recoupable monies for his films, he has found that if you include a line item for yourself, you're less likely to be funded. Investors don't like to fund fees, he said. If you imply that you'll figure out a way to pay yourself, "it shows you're walking the walk." Nemeth also said that it's better to sell your film earlier in the production process than later. "If you sell at the end of the process, you get a quarter to a third less funding," he maintained.

Cogan's Impact Partners is, according to his bio, "a fund and advisory service for investors and philanthropists who seek to promote social change through film." Among the films that the company has been involved with include the Academy Award-winning films The Cove and Freeheld. In discussing the double bottom line--that is, films that make money and make a difference in a given social issue--Cogan cited three factors in assessing a documentary: "Can this be a great film? Is it about a compelling social issue? Can we get money back that we're putting into it?"

The conversation turned to footage--which these days is as important in pitching your documentary as a proposal. Kuperstock advised to send her "something that makes me want to see more, that conveys a sense of the story and what the film is going to look like."  The panel also seemed to shy away from trailers--"I've been tricked too many times," Meier noted, about slickly produced pieces that are not ultimately what the film is about.

As far as the revenue part of the conversation, Coogan maintained that 90 percent of it what you earn back on your doc comes from television sales, but cautioned that very few US outlets are paying more than $100,000, while presales in Europe can amount to $300,000. Nemeth advised to allocate a percentage of the revenue to your cause.

Next up at the Filmmaker Forum was a pair of case studies--Jen Arnold's A Small Act and Mark Landsman's Thunder Soul, both of which have garnered praise and honors this year on the festival circuit and beyond. Lisa Leeman, director of the award-winning One Lucky Elephant, moderated the panel, which also included A Small Act's producer/cinematographer Patti Lee and Thunder Soul's producer Keith Calder. Starting out the conversation with how the respective films got funded, Arnold said she had hooked up with a production company, Cherry Sky, at the FIND Directors Lab with funding. She admitted that she had budgeted her film very low, and the company funded about a quarter of what the budget actually was. Landsman, on the other hand, didn't have a budget when he and Calder made Thunder Soul, which tells the story of a Houston-based high school funk band from the 1970s that reunites 40 years later. "When you try to budget, it's unrealistic," he explained. Instead, "The content dictated the expenses." The production company, Snoot Entertainment, which had never produced a documentary before, gave Landsman and his crew the funding they needed as the production progressed.

Any documentaries have their own happy accidents and serendipitous moments. For Landsman, there wasn't much archival footage of the band, so they had to make do with stills. But late in the production process, someone he had met in Houston told him about a 35-minute documentary that had been made in 1972 for a local Houston television station about the band. That footage formed an essential spine for the film.

"Never make a documentary in a language you can't speak," warned Arnold. A Small Act tells the story of Chris Mburu, who grew up in poverty in Kenya and, thanks to an anonymous benefactor who financed his primary and secondary education, went on to become a Harvard-educated human rights lawyer. The film documents his efforts to start up a scholarship fund for the next generation of Kenyan children.  Arnold and her crew relied on their driver to let them know when something important was being discussed--but in filming one crucial scene he informed Arnold's crew after the subject had been discussed. They ended up filming a discussion about who had fed the cow. Given that 42 languages are spoken in Kenya, it was an an arduous task to find Kenyans who could speak the main ones as well as English-and it took nine months to get the dailies translated.

But all went well in the end for Arnold. HBO bought the film after the IFP Film Week, then A Small Act got into Sundance, and over the past year, audiences have contributed $1.4 million in cash and pledges to the scholarship fund. Mburu had hoped to make a modest difference with a small act; next year, according to Arnold, 300 kids across Kenya will benefit from the impact the film has made.

For Landsman, after trying for a year to get Thunder Soul into high-profile festivals, he got into SXSW, where the film won the first of five festival circuit awards. "Never underestimate the power of community grassroots interest in your project," Landman noted. He screened Thunder Soul before an audience of music educators in Texas, and he forged a partnership with the Grammy Foundation to promote arts education in schools. As for distribution, Calder said that a major studio has expressed interest early on, then changed its mind. Now they've reinitiated interest in the film, and Calder was in the process of closing a deal.

Thomas White is editor of Documentary.