IDA and the Paley Center for Media

Present a special DocuDay NY opening night screening of GASLAND

Paley Center for Media
February 22nd, 2011
Screening 6:30 p.m.

Meet the film’s Director, Josh Fox, and Producer, Trish Adlesic, at this special screening and post-screening Q&A.

The Paley Center for Media is located at 25 West 52nd Street New York, NY 10103 (between 5th Avenue & 6th Avenue).

Tickets: $15 for IDA Members / $20 General Admission. To receive IDA member discount enter discount code "IDA"

Purchase Tickets Now

ABOUT THE FILM: The largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history has swept across the United States. The Halliburton-developed drilling technology of "fracking" or hydraulic fracturing has unlocked a "Saudia Arabia of natural gas" just beneath us. But is fracking safe? When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his land for drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey uncovering a trail of secrets, lies and contamination. A recently drilled nearby Pennsylvania town reports that residents are able to light their drinking water on fire. This is just one of the many absurd and astonishing revelations of a new country called GASLAND. Part verite travelogue, part expose, part mystery, part bluegrass banjo meltdown, part showdown.

See the rest of the Oscar nominated documentary films at DocuDay New York and DocuDay Los Angeles.

In the first moments of José Padilha's Secrets of the Tribe, about the anthropologists who study the Yanomami, we learn exactly what the observed think of the observer: "You Nabäs are always such liars," says one tribesman. "I don't like to believe anything you say because you always lie." After watching this 96-minute film that documents a "he said-he said" war of egos fought among ethically dubious anthropologists on opposing sides of a theoretical debate that includes accusations of genocide and pederasty, it's hard to disagree.

Insulated by the dense rain forests along the border of Venezuela and Brazil, the Yanomami became known to the outside world as vicious and fearsome after the publication of American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon's groundbreaking study, Yanomamö: The Fierce People. Released in 1968, it describes the tribe, thought to have descended from the Asians who first crossed the Bering Strait, as warring over women and celebrating in hallucinogenic frenzies.

The data Chagnon collected for his book and the films he made with Timothy Asch seemed definitive evidence in support of biological determinism, which purports that genes and the evolutionary imperative to pass them on are the primary forces that shape human culture. Chagnon had made his career, and his rise in academia only cemented the Yanomami's reputation as "Fierce People." The book became de rigueur in Anthro 101 courses on campuses around the world and has since been reissued in five editions, selling more than four million copies. It was also a herald to other anthropologists and scientists who beat a path to the jungle in order to gather their own data among the last unacculturated peoples in the world--data that paint radically different pictures of the Yanomami.

In Secrets of the Tribe, Padilha interviews an entire roster of Who's Who in American Anthropology to explore the controversy that first entered the mainstream with Patrick Tierney's November 2006 New Yorker article, "Fierce Anthropologist." Tierney's book Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, published that same year, is a dense catalogue of unethical and illegal actions perpetrated not only by Chagnon, but also by his colleagues: Dr. James Neel, a geneticist doing research for the Atomic Energy Commission; Venezuelan naturalist Charles Brewer Carías, who had ties to gold-mining interests; and Collège de France's respected linguist Jacques Lizot, who traded goods for sex with Yanomami boys. Also revealing how governments, fellow academics and missionaries cast a blind eye toward these atrocities, the book landed like a bomb and blew up an entire discipline.

 "Mike Chamberlain [of Britain's Stampede Films] took Tierney's article to Nick Fraser at BBC, and Nicky called me," says Padilha, whose Bus 174 was a big success for BBC Storyville back in 2002. When I spoke with the Brazilian filmmaker in April 2010, he was fresh from the opening-night screening of Secrets of the Tribe at the Rio version of It's All True, Brazil's 15-year-old documentary festival. He was also in the midst of post-production on his sequel to Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), a fiction feature about the take-no-prisoners police force that is attempting to wrest control of Rio's slums from entrenched drug lords. When I ask why he chose to make Secrets, his answer is surprising: "Because I love science."

A student of math and physics, Padilha turned to filmmaking after a brief, unsatisfying career in banking. Since producing 1999's The Charcoal People under the wing of Oscar-winning documentarian Nigel Noble, Padilha and his production partner Marcos Prado have made several films together, acting as producer on each other's projects. In his documentaries, Padilha takes an aesthetic approach called for by the material. To reconstruct the tragic life story of the hijacker of a Rio city bus in Bus 174, he used the plentiful news and amateur footage taken at the scene, which was badly managed by local authorities. Garapa, his 2009 documentary about the effects of chronic hunger on three families in Brazil's arid northeast, was shot cinema vérité style on black-and-white 35mm film and finished without music. The Golden Bear-winning Tropa de Elite would have been a documentary, if, as Padilha told me in a 2009 interview, he didn't fear for his life. For Secrets of the Tribe, Padilha knew immediately it would primarily consist of talking heads, with each scientist and the surviving Yanomami having their say.

To interview the Yanomami, Padilha did what those before him had done: He paid them. "Everything is trade with the Yanomami," he explains. How did he get Chagnon to willingly revisit the allegations that forced the embattled anthropologist into early retirement? "I say I am making a film about science," Padilha explains. "Everyone thinks they are the good scientists and everyone else is doing bad science.

"The methodology of anthropology is flawed," Padilha continues. "Each anthropologist finds exactly the evidence to fit his paradigm. To destroy the data you have to destroy the person. Who cares how you feel about Einstein? Take his data to the lab and see if what he says holds up. No one ever said that about Einstein, but you get my point...Chagnon doesn't agree with Ken Good, so he says, ‘Oh, he married a teenager.'"

The cavalcade of bickering eggheads that Padilha created in the editing room is riveting, sometimes even funny. The interviews with the Yanomami, who describe entire villages of people dying, sexual abuse and the havoc wrought by anthropologists who traded information for steel axes and machetes, create a cumulative effect that can only be described as heartbreak. Watching archival footage of Yanomami: A Multidisciplinary Study (1968) and The Feast (1970), both shot by Asch during the joint Neel-Chagnon study on a measles vaccine, we learn that most of the people on film died shortly thereafter.

Pieces of Jean-Pierre Marchand's collaboration with Jacques Lizot, Les indiens Yanomami (1968), stands in for Lizot, who declined Padilha's request for an interview. (He is now sought by French police on an unrelated molestation charge and is thought to be in Morocco.) "The film is very candid on Lizot, yet I did not touch the surface of what he did," says Padilha. "The French injected the Yanomami with radioactive isotopes. The French side is much uglier than it looks in the film."

The French arm of ARTE is one of the co-production partners on Secrets of the Tribe and, it turns out, protective of Jacques Lizot and the Collège de France, where Lizot's mentor Claude Lévi-Strauss was chair of social anthropology. ARTE asked Padilha to put Lizot's pederasty in context. "Many of these [commissioning] editors come from liberal arts, anthropology backgrounds," says the filmmaker. "No one thinks about the kids." For his part, he sent the filmed testimony to Interpol in Brazil, which sent it on to France. "Lizot can be active somewhere right now," he notes. "When I showed [the footage] to the French, they didn't even consider this. If Lizot had molested French boys? Yanomami kids are far away. They intellectualize it as somehow excusable."

Anthropologists behaving badly is nothing new. Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, asked Arctic explorer Robert Peary to bring him back "a middle-aged Eskimo, preferably from Greenland," for the American Museum of Natural History's live dioramas. Within eight months, four of the six Inuits Peary delivered had died of tuberculosis. Congolese pygmy Ota Benga lived at the museum and later at New York's Bronx Zoo before killing himself. Ishi, the last of the California Yahi Indians, lived at the University of California's Museum of Anthropology, and some of his remains were shipped off to the Smithsonian. Robert Flaherty--whose Nanook of the North unleashed a controversy in ethnographic filmmaking that continues today--fathered an Inuit son he later refused to acknowledge, or help. Even the ethically meticulous Margaret Mead admitted to having considered a sexual affair with one of the Samoans she was studying.

Today, anthropology is going through another round of soul-searching. Barbara Rose Johnston, who saw Secrets when it premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, invited Padilha and his film to the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting, held in November in New Orleans. "I think it is a trap," Padilha joked back in April. "Maybe they will try to kill me." The film, minus its director, became part of a panel exploring the ethics of the discipline and, in a move that cannot be coincidental, the AAA decided to drop the word "science" from its statement on long-range plans. "The thing is, I think that biology has a lot to do with behavior," Padilha says." But the science is clumsy. Chagnon is an embarrassment to sociobiology. This film will help that."

No matter how anthropology decides to settle its debates, it is clear from the film that the Yanomami reached a verdict long ago. "Look here, they are taking my picture again," one man points at Padilha's camera. "You should be ignorant of us."

Secrets of the Tribes airs March 2 on HBO. The film is distributed in the international broadcast market through Sideways Film, and in the worldwide educational market through Documentary Educational Resources, which also distributes Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon's Yanamamö Series, including The Feast and Yanomami: A Multidisciplinary Study.

Shari Kizirian currently lives in Rio de Janeiro.

Arguments about truth in documentary filmmaking—how "real" a film is or isn't—are inherent to the form, part of its DNA. "Reality" is an eternal question (Platonic ideal?) in an art form that demands both honesty and manipulation: honesty through its humanity and manipulation through its craft. But are a film's insights and revelations about the human condition any less untrue as a result of its craft?

There's the maxim in moviemaking that "every cut is a lie," therefore documentary filmmaking is essentially a paradox: an unspooling of truth built on a careful pyramid of intricate lies. Or is it?

The irony is that as the craft of the documentary form has become more visible, with filmmakers applying a full range of cinematic tools, the questions of truth or untruth have rung more loudly and with more persistence. From Catfish to Exit Through the Gift Shop, and extending all the way to hybrid provocations like Bruno and I'm Still Here, these questions—sometimes accusations—of truth or lies have consumed and confounded documentary circles in the last several years. It's almost like a seesaw, and "Craft" is the fat kid that hopped on that wooden plank in the playground, only to leave Truth hanging in the air.

Likewise, truth itself is the pearl in the oyster that filmmakers are always searching to retrieve and hold up to the world: as a containable marker of the human condition, as proof of their subject's merit and as validation for their own pursuits.

I myself have participated on documentary panels where filmmakers argued—prompted by audience questions—about whether editing a subject's dialogue to eliminate pauses, coughs, stammers and lost trains of thought constituted a betrayal of truth. And I've scratched my head thinking, "If I can't discern information or extract emotion from your filmmaking because I'm distracted or bored by your subject's rambling, what is the point of your attempt to preserve this truth at the expense of a far greater one?"

Folks, if the choice is between honest diction or emotional revelation, I suggest you pick the latter. Which brings me to my litmus test:

Essential Truth vs. Literal Truth

Literal Truth: Bob went to the market.

Essential Truth: Bob went to the 7-11 at midnight for a six-pack because he's an alcoholic.

Both may be true statements, but one is basic and without insight or analysis, while the other is more insightful due to its analysis. Or, some would say, insightful because of its judgments...but aren't "insights" and "judgments" often one and the same, defined only by the eye of the judge and juror? And who in the documentary field would deny their true callings as amateur psychologists? Isn't that why we're all here—to judge?

Thus, I believe it can (and should) be argued, that the craft of documentary filmmaking—good filmmaking—is to provide the analysis needed to reveal human insights, the essential truths. A movie composed of literal truths would be 100 percent true in the strictest sense, but also quite possibly the most bereft of real insight, while attaining, perhaps, complete unwatchability in its dogged pursuit of honesty.

To insist on literal truth at every turn in a documentary would rob a filmmaker of his or her tools to contextualize information and character. Simple omission—filtering the flow of human information to extract the minerals of a story's Essential Truth—is invaluable. I've yet to see a documentary that deeply moved me, yet left me concerned that information was left out of its telling. I would not have enjoyed The King of Kong any less had director Seth Gordon included its characters' complete family lineages or detailed medical histories (Chapter Twelve: "Billy's Cousin's Hernia"). 

Conversely, when I sometimes watch biographical docs, I think, "This piece of information may make your film more comprehensive or more complete, but can you show me only what I need to know to understand or appreciate your subject and your film's themes? Can you step away from the material for one moment to explain to me, in short...Who Fucking Cares?"

This is not to say that filmmakers should ignore literal truths. But there are times when panning for the gold of essential truth requires cinematic arts to magnify the nuggets:  cross-cutting, repetition, juxtaposition, irony. Life doesn't always come with reaction shots. Or cutaways. Or context for third-party consumption. However, movies do, and these elements all amplify your Essential Truth.

 "Simple" truth is just that: simple. The documentary filmmaker in his or her element is still a storyteller, albeit one who deals in the real. But when has anyone ever regaled a crowd with a true story enjoyed merely for its precise and wholly accurate recollection of events? Perhaps only in Ricky Gervais' film titled...The Invention of Lying.

Audiences walk away from documentaries remembering the things that made them cry, made them laugh, made them think, made them relate. They do not walk away admiring the integrity of the process. In fact, they don't even think your process—-and probably shouldn't—that is, unless the essential truths themselves are in question. If they're thinking at all about process, they're not enjoying the sausage enough to forget about how it's made.

When Does Craft Outweigh Truth?

The cries against the likes of Catfish and its ilk came from many in the documentary community saying they didn't believe the constructed reality of the film. In some cases, they felt it was "too good" to be true. 

Interestingly enough, I didn't hear this critique from general audiences. They either found the film captivating or they didn't. Their critique was more along the lines of "Yeah, so what? Who isn't lying on Facebook?" rather than a questioning of the filmmakers' integrity.

What I personally extract from the doc community's critique of Catfish are the voices of filmmakers who know all-too-well how the sausage is made, looking at this particular work and seeing too much visible craft. Too much omission to deny. And they're unwilling to go along for the ride, the ride that every documentary would like to take you on. To those detractors, regarding this specific film, I say,Your loss. But their critique points toward a larger, and more important issue: Filmmakers should be mindful of the fact that the cognitive or emotional leaps they require their audiences to take may allow the seams of their constructs to show.

Early in Howard Stern's autobiographical film, Private Parts, when Stern plays himself as a Boston University student, clearly 20 years too late, he looks directly into camera and says (I'm paraphrasing), "Sometimes you just gotta suspend disbelief." (Sidenote: I think it's good to bring lowbrow cultural references into a highminded debate. Stay with me).  Unfortunately, with a sophisticated audience who understands the documentary craft—who knows, consciously, that every cut may be, to some extent, a lie—there's a breaking point where they may not be able to suspend disbelief...in order to believe wholeheartedly. When the lights go down, let's face it: We all want to believe.

"We know that you're going for essential truth," the sophisticates seem to be saying, "And we're willing to forego some literal truth to get there.  Well...some of us are, anyway. But don't let us question the motivation of your cinematic manipulations—or we will fail to believe your essential truth entirely.  We may even become quite pissed off."  Films that breach this tacit agreement with their audience have a problem—and it's a motivation problem. It's not even what's on screen anymore, it's the question of what's behind what's onscreen: the man peeking out from the curtain. But dammit, get that man out of sight—and don't let me contemplate his machinations!

When they question your essential truth, you're in trouble. As George Burns used to say, "Sincerity's everything. And if you can fake that, you've got it made."

Eddie Schmidt is the Board President of IDA, and an Academy Award-nominated essential truth-teller who has produced the documentaries Twist of Faith, This Film Is Not Yet Rated and Troubadours, among others.

Be a Part of the Movement to Guarantee Healthy Arts Funding &
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The House Appropriations Committee has proposed a mid-year budget cut to dozens of valuable federal programs, including support for the arts.  They want to cut the National Endowment for the Arts budget mid-stream from $167.5 million to $155 million.

The bill goes to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote next week. Unfortunately, this is where the battle really begins. Expectations are that the Republican Study Committee will offer amendments that would cut even more money and quite possibly attempt to zero-out the NEA.

Now is the time for arts advocates to mobilize with a strong and unified voice. Join the IDA and the Americans for the Arts Action Fund in getting 50,000 messages to Congress over the next week.

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Omar Amiralay, a Syria-based documentary maker and one of the most influential filmmakers in the Arab world, died February 6 at his home in Damascus of an apparent heart attack. He was 66. According to a report from ABC News in Australia, Amiralay was very supportive of the ongoing uprising in Egypt, having signed a declaration by independent Syrians a week ago. Moreover, he was critical of his own country, stating recently, "I live in a country steadfastly marching on its hooves to its own demise, after it was betrayed by its rulers, deserted by its brainpower and abandoned by its intellectuals. My cinema is no more than my expression of scorn at the despair and tyranny that governs life around me, and the role of man in compounding it with more hopelessness and abuse."

According to an entry in Wikipedia, his most notable work is a trilogy of documentaries about the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates--Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970, Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974) and A Flood in Baath Country (2003)--in which he examined the impact of the development project on the lives of the citizens who live near it, as well as its larger political ramifications. Everyday Life in a Syrian Village earned two awards the 1976 Berlin Film Festival.

As a political activist, Amiralay was a signatory, in 2000, to the "Declaration of the 99," a manifesto signed by 99 prominent Syrian intellectuals calling for "an end to the state of emergency in force since 1963, the release of all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, and the permitting of political parties and independent civil society organizations." In 2005, Amirilay signed a declaration by Syrian intellectuals calling for a withdrawal by Syria from Lebanon.

According to the ABC News report, most of Amiralay's work has been banned in Syria, whose cinema is heavily controlled by the government. Amiralay studied film in Paris, at La Fémis, the French state film school, whose formidable roster of alums includes Louis Malle, Costa-Gavras, Alain Renais, Claire Denis, Patrice Lecomte and many others.

PARE LORENTZ DOCUMENTARY FUND

Made possible by The New York Community Trust

Inspired by the legacy of documentary pioneer, Pare Lorentz, the Fund supports projects that reflect the spirit and nature of his films and embody Lorentz' central concerns - the appropriate use of the natural environment, social justice, and the illumination of pressing social problems - presented as a compelling story through skillful filmmaking.

Perhaps it was from celebrating the festival's 10th anniversary through the rousing rituals of a sauna, ice swim and night of Finno-Balkan beats, but the DocPoint Festival, which ran from January 25 through 30, in both Helsinki, Finland, and Tallinn, Estonia, made a wry virtue of Finnishness. Witness the welcome letter from Executive Director Leena Närekangas and Artistic Director Erkko Lyytinen to festival guests:

"The Finno-Urgic bloodline obliges us to behave in a peculiar way. Our way of expression is stiff and brief...[In the Q&As] don't get depressed if there is not exactly a rain of questions right from the beginning. That is because of our national norms...we just need a little bit of time to get the conversation going!"

This self-awareness was also evident off of the page. Following a screening in Tallinn of Bohemian Eyes, a new documentary on Finnish actor Matti Pellonpää, who shone in the country's films of the 1980s and 1990s, director Janne Kuusi waited for the audience to ask questions. With no takers, he encouraged the Estonian crowd by saying, "Don't be so Finnish."

Droll self-awareness and concerted promotion have made documentaries of two-sided appeals. Last year the two most popular festival films, Reindeerspotting (Dir.: Joonas Neuvonen) and Steam of Life (Dirs.: Joonas Berghäll, Mika Hotakainen), illustrated the potential of Finnish documentaries to be externally accessible while opening new angles on native life, whether drug abuse in the north of the country or the intimate histories of the land's less prominent, male gender.

Following last year's success, this year's Finnish documentaries were presented with a frank judgment of local accomplishments, as described in the festival's "Report from the New Finnish Documentary Films": "The best submissions were excellent but there were not many in the top class...[and for student films] It was even harder to identify unique, solid works of art...Some unique short films, such as Elina Talvensaari's How to Pick Berries, stood out positively."

Talvensaari's short, which has screened at Venice and other festivals, portrays the tensions between Lapland locals and the Thai workers who come to pick berries in the woods. The professors and students of the documentary department of Aalto University's School of Art and Design explained at our screening that while the film can be placed among debates about guest workers, Finnish audiences see the irony in the townspeople's complaints about foreign laborers, given the ratio of forests to the population.

Among popular selections such as Exit Through the Gift Shop and Inside Job, a master class with Stefan Jarl, a session on the Congo, and a career tribute to Pekka Lehto, as well as the first accompaniment of Jean Painlevé's underwater studies by a Finnish rapper and music group, the section of Finnish classics revealed continuities with contemporary docs that led to fresh contemplations on Finns and documentary's role in national life.

As Närekangas and Lyytinen noted in their welcoming letter, the famous Finnish reticence is loosening among the younger generation. Yet Finnish documentaries are distinguished by the ways they have overcome varieties of silence and absences. For example:

When filmmaker Antti Peippo was dying of cancer, he used tilting movements on archival and family photos, drawings and paintings, with concise remembrances to resurrect his childhood in Sijainen (Proxy; 1989), in which he recalls his mother "smothering some words on the way home from school: ‘I hope you'll die soon.'"

Where there were no family records, filmmaker Johanna Vanhala used Super-8 footage from other families to illustrate her childhood memories before her separation from her mother, as the end title tells us for her short Voitko Rakastaa (Could You Love?; 2010).

And following a long separation from her father, filmmaker Anu Kuivalainen edited shots of her trip to visit him, with non-synchronous recordings of her discussions, anxieties and attempts to make contact, concluding with his brief message on her machine, and a glimpse of him in long shot at the doors of a station in Orpojen joulu (Christmas in the Distance; 1994).

Even with onscreen drama, as in the trials of vacuum-cleaner salesmen in Pölynimurikauppiaat (Suckers; Dir.: John Webster; 1993), restraint in behavior leads to effective and "hilarious moments of Finnishness" (in the words of the festival catalogue), as when a salesman asks a widower to play his accordion before pressing his wares. The national manner can also inspire filmmakers by necessity. In Marja-Sisko (Dir.: Reetta Aalto; 2010), neither the Church where the protagonist works nor a transgender association would speak on camera about her gender-correction surgery. So the director turned the reflections of her character, which was meant only as preliminary research, into the film's non-synchronous commentary.

While the absence of talking heads may be characteristic of regional, rather than only Finnish documentaries, the lack of the convention illustrates a range of relationships between image and soundtrack. How to Pick Berries blends the townspeople's voices without showing them onscreen, so their criticisms of the foreign workers acquire the force of community prejudice. While the women of Auf Wiedersehen, Finland (Dir.: Virpi Suutari; 2010) recall their flight from their homeland with the Germans who were their country's allies, the film shows them in old age braiding their hair, lying on their beds or lifting weights. Although the film includes the story of one man, the son of a Finnish woman and German soldier, his story blends with the women's into one tale of reversal, rejection and a difficult return.

In the most memorable Finnish documentaries, stylistic ingenuity in overcoming the absences of people or the past matches a strong responsibility to the material, or as director Suutari asked, "What is the truth you are trying to find and how do you get at it?" She and her crew shot super-8 footage to convey the women's passage out of Finland to Germany, to mirror the material shot by American soldiers from the end of the war. Rather than manufacturing a false continuity, this decision becomes evident when the son of the German soldier is filmed with his mother in Super-8, as if their stories have become part of history through their testimonies on camera. Such strategies recall essential questions of documentary: how re-creations and the catalyst of the camera can evoke experience, with respect towards the subjects who share it.

In ten years, DocPoint has provided Finnish documentaries with a base for successful distribution in theaters. Since 2003, the number of festival attendees has more than doubled, to over 30,000 this year in Helsinki and Tallinn combined. Since last year, it has become the only documentary--and perhaps only film--festival to attract full houses simultaneously in two capital cities. It has brought connoisseurs of documentary to Finland and the Baltics--in January--and continues to preserve the region's nonfiction film heritage. For example, DocPoint paid for the print of Suckers to be transferred to DigiBeta and subtitled for its festival screening.

Across the documentary field, there has been a growing convergence with the aesthetics and distribution practices of fiction films. Liisa Lehmusto, who worked at DocPoint from 2003 to 2010, notes in her article for the leaflet "New Finnish Documentary Films 2011" that "the word ‘documentary' was not even mentioned" in the marketing materials for Reindeerspotting, Steam of Life and Vesku from Finland, the country's top three nonfiction box-office successes of last year. This fusion of forms may be accelerated by the recent collapse of public broadcasting in Europe, including the Finnish YLE, which, according to producer Liisa Juntunen, has not financed a work for over a year. While the backing of both the Finnish Film Foundation (SES) and Centre for Audio-Visual Culture (AVEK) gives Finnish documentaries more support than in other European countries, filmmakers still seek new outlets of distribution, such as Juntunen's work on the board of the distribution organization Film Contact (at present only in Finnish).

One hopes documentary ethics will not fade in the remaking of its art. In Finland there is less likelihood of losing this dimension of empathy, as it remains part of a self-conscious modesty, and of filmmakers' sense of how they bring people's experiences to light. Documentary's foundations will then be refreshed in Finland, by a competent, punctual, at times conversationally-challenged, but altogether decent people, freed at this year's festival by sunlight, saunas and Balkan beats.

For further information about the Finnish documentary community, here's an article from the February 2006 issue of Documentary magazine.

Having covered most of the major European nonfiction festivals, Gabriel M. Paletz teaches documentary and screenwriting at the Prague Film School in the Czech Republic. Among recent work, he has co-programmed the original series “Documentary and the City” for this summer’s edition of DokuFest in Prizren, Kosovo.