THIS EVENT IS OVER AND WAS A COMPLETE SUCCESS. THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO ATTENDED.

IDA is proud to present this very special Doc U, scheduled for Monday, October 18th at The Cinefamily (at The Silent Movie Theater). Doors open at 7 p.m. 

October's exceptional Doc U session features a live appearance by Lucy Walker, a rising star of documentary filmmaking whose recent films Waste Land and Countdown To Zero have been dominating 2010's major festivals! The evening's on-stage conversation and film clips will be followed by an audience Q&A, and a wine reception sponsored by The Pithy Little Wine Company on the Cinefamily's backyard patio.

Discount admission available for IDA members. IDA's September Doc U featuring Harry Shearer sold out, and seating is again limited for the Lucy Walker event, so BUY YOUR TICKETS NOW to be guaranteed admission.

For further event details and to buy tickets, view the event page.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides funding for the making of a 3-minute PSA about Docs Rock.

Video was created by UCLA film students, Diana Densmore and Susana Casares.

Find out more about IDA's Docs Rock program.

DONATE to IDA - it's 100% tax deductible.

IDA's Docs Rock program received $9,000 in support from the City of Los Angeles' Department of Cultural Affairs for the 2010-2011 school year.

In its 12th year, Docs Rock introduces high school students to the world of documentary filmmaking.  Docs Rock prepares youth for college and employment by teaching them essential life skills as well as the technical know-how to create a documentary.  The intensive curriculum offers: in-class and outside the classroom activities, hands-on filmmaking experience and opportunities to meet numerous industry professionals. At the end of each school year, the 40-week program culminates with Docs Rock Festival, where student films are showcased to local residents, family members, community leaders, and professional filmmakers.

To learn more about Docs Rock and view student films, go to the dedicated Docs Rock page.

To make a donation to Docs Rock or if your high school is interested in implementing the Docs Rock program, please contact our development associate, Cindy at cindy@documentary.org.

Supervisor, First District, Gloria Molina recently confirmed a grant award to IDA in the amount of $53,500 from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.  The funds will be used to support IDA's acclaimed Doc U Program, a series of hands-on educational seminars for aspiring and experienced documentary filmmakers, taught by artists and experts on subjects ranging from marketing and distribution to working with composers, writers or agents.

IDA also received a grant earlier this year from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the amount of $7,500 to expand Doc U to cities outside of the Los Angeles area.

These funding awards allow IDA to better support documentary filmmakers, and we are grateful for the generosity of both the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Foundation for their ongoing support of IDA.

For more information on Doc U, visit the Doc U page.

David Wolper, whose Wolper Organization was a pioneering force in documentary production during the first two decades of American television, passed away last night at his home in Beverly Hills. He had been suffering from congestive heart failure and Parkinson's Disease.

With almost all of the news and documentary work being produced in New York in the 1950s, Wolper set up shop in Los Angeles and lured filmmakers like Mel Stuart and Jack Haley Jr. to work with him. Over the next decades, the Wolper team produced such works as The Race for Space, D-Day, The Making of the President series, the Jacques Cousteau television specials and hundreds more. He and his team would go on to earn nine Oscar nominations and one Oscar (for Hellstrom Chronicle), two Peabodys and 100 other awards.

"David brought the documentary to Hollywood," says Stuart. "The West Coast became an important source of documentaries from about 1959 on, and David was able to persuade the major networks to air them. His main strength was that he was able to find ideas and come up with ideas that would appeal to the networks. What we created was a place where David didn't direct the programs himself, but there was an atmosphere where all the creative personnel had a freedom that you don't have today. We made our films, David sold them and we didn't have any interference from either the sponsors or the networks."

Wolper was also instrumental in helping to launch the International Documentary Association. He attended the first meeting in 1982, and he provided valuable counsel and financial support in the beginning years. He earned the Career Achievement Award in 1988, and thanks to the efforts of then-IDA board member Gabor Kalman, the Student Documentary Achievement Award bears his name to this day.

"One of David's great talents was that he had an absolute instinct for what would be successful," says IDA founder Linda Buzzell, who was director of research at the Wolper Organization. "He had the same instinct for people. He really could recognize talent."

 "David had the ability, with the networks and sponsors who were buying these films, to give them the dream," Stuart adds. "He was a dreamer, but he made the dreams come true."

Amir Bar-Lev, director of The Tillman Story, was no great insider to his subject, post-NFL athlete and US Corporal Patrick Tillman, when he began making his film. "I knew there were myths around his death," Bar-Lev says, "but what began to intrigue me was when we found out there were equally as many myths about his life."

Bar-Lev's last film, My Kid Could Paint That, is about a could-be toddler art-prodigy with a curiously unsuccessful painter-father. As My Kid also traffics in themes of family and misrepresentation, the director "sheepishly handed over a copy of the film [to the Tillman family] as an example of my work. I had to tell them, ‘Unless Pat's dad was secretly playing football for him...'"

Pat Tillman was a popular professional football player before deciding to enlist. A tall and imposing 25-year-old, Tillman was on his second tour when he was pronounced dead. As the news had brought such attention to this man who left a multi-million-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to fight for his country, his death was a project for careful PR. Military publicity transformed this already principled and courageous figure into a hero--and they did this by rewriting the details of his death. Armed with a massive box of records, Dannie Tillman, Pat's mother, uncovered a considerable revision of history. Pat, the victim of friendly fire, was killed during an awkwardly plotted expedition by his own troops, many of whom reported they were just eager to be in a firefight. Pat Tillman was a public figure because of his career, and his decision to enlist put him in the public eye for new reasons, so it's easy to see why his loss, a national tragedy by its very nature, could not be reported as an accident besot with incompetence.

The Tillman Story features an incredible amount of report footage, the most impressive of which was footage that may or may not have been taken from the expedition during which Tillman was killed. This footage, which was captured from a vehicle, is disarmingly unspecific; neither people nor distinguishing traits of landscape appear, so what we see, which might otherwise present us with all the answers we need, is actually no evidence at all--there is no answer in the image.

 "Pat's last words were ‘I'm Pat Fucking Tillman,'" notes Bar-Lev. "On one level he was saying, ‘I'm your platoon-mate,' trying to indicate to the soldiers shooting at him from 40 meters away for 15 minutes. In retrospect, there's a deep irony. Only minutes after he died, people would begin turning him into something he wasn't, so his last words sound like a call from the dead, from a guy saying, ‘I'm just who I am, don't make me something I'm not'--which is exactly what happened."

It's easy to find the situation confusing; after all, this homegrown success story leaves a lucrative NFL contract to fight in Afghanistan. Just based on that choice, he sounds like a hero in the old guard. However, as Bar-Lev points out, "He wasn't, as they described him, ‘above all, principled'; he wasn't a paragon of moral certitude; he was curious and tried to see things from every possible point of view." And, in a way, that desire to see from many vantage points is what Bar-Lev is trying to return to his subject--a man who took risks and won games like the best leaders of legend, but was flattened into a fake icon and exploited by national media. The curious part of this dehumanizing is distinguishing the culprits from the messengers. Was it a failure of intelligence or a failure of reporting? Regardless, those in charge of the information weren't going to help.

Tillman's mother was tireless. A short period after his death, the Army relinquished its intelligence on the incident to her. Presented with thousands of pages about a son's death, most parents would throw up their hands, but she dug through the material and found the roots of what amounted to a government cover-up. Forcing an opportunity to get answers from Congress, the family took part in a hearing. Confronting the generals in charge would seem like a promising conclusion to a battle with injustice and false impression, but it wasn't. "When audiences see the scene in the congressional room, they're vocally angry, yelling at the screen, because it's so patently obvious [what's happening]," Bar-Lev notes. "But that's not at all how it was reported; those generals gave this kind of Keystone Kops, self-flagellating, disingenuous apology--‘Gee, we're sorry we screwed this thing up'-- and it was reported as ‘Military Apologizes to The Tillmans.' We all engage in sound bites, but the treatment of Tillman to this point flattens him, shaving off sides of his personality to conform to a Hollywood cookie-cutter [ideal]."

An illuminating outtake in the film shows a congressman trying to calm Dannie Tillman at the hearing. "She asked a basic question, and one of these patronizing lieutenants said, ‘Ma'am, this was like the first scene in Saving Private Ryan.' What a great post-modern moment! Everyone knows Hollywood learns about warfare from the military--but the military learns about soldiering from Hollywood. It goes back through this hall of mirrors to the beginning of time; it's a chicken-and-egg thing. You have to believe these 19-year-old kids from Pat's platoon, the ones who shot on his position with these powerful and somewhat fun weapons, were learning how to shoot them partially from training and partially from films."

In the process of reviewing Tillman, Bar-Lev describes a different model of heroism; he considers this a necessity, given the actions of his subject and those of the Tillman family. "I hope the story of Tillman tells us that heroism and humanity are not contradictory and heroism is complex," he maintains. "‘Hero' is a problematic word that says a lot more about the people using it than the person they're speaking about."

On the pitfalls of representing a subject that's so extensively about misrepresentation, Bar-Lev observes, "There may not be such thing as ‘Truth.' but there is definitely such thing as a bullshit-lie, and that's between you and your footage. Your cutting is your opinion."

The Tillman Story begins at a football field during a ceremony to honor Tillman and his family. The first we see of him is in direct address as he's shooting the footage on which his performance statistics will be overlaid for TV broadcast. This footage, without the benefit of stats to give the eerie piece context, just shows Tillman looking forward, silent, waiting for the cameraman to let him leave. He looks at the camera in pregnant silence, and we don't know why. "He just staring at you for an uncomfortable amount of time, and anytime you're looking at an uncomfortably long silence of a person in front of you, you impose your own narrative," Bar-Lev notes. "And that's what we've been doing to Pat Tillman from the moment he enlisted. He's never had a chance to speak for himself; he's been subject to one narrative or another. At the end of the film, you see that kind of uncomfortably alive footage fossilized into a statue. Our film is bookended by the living Pat and its antipode that's not moving."

The statue of Tillman, which stands in front of the University of Phoenix Stadium at the newly titled Pat Tillman Freedom Plaza, captures a famous image of Tillman in motion--it's a bronze re-creation of the Sports Illustrated cover shot of Tillman the day he helped the Cardinals win a game against the Dallas Cowboys. "We called that the Han Solo moment," Bar-Lev explains. "You remember, when he was dipped in the vat of--Wow, dipped into that vat of something we don't have on this planet!"

The Tillman Story premieres in theaters August 20 through The Weinstein Company.

Sara Vizcarrando is a film journalist writing and living in San Francisco, Calif.

Editor's Note: Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished airs Tuesday, May 3, on PBS' Independent Lens. The following article was published last August in conjunction with the film's theatrical premiere.

A Film Unfinished takes audiences on a journey back some 68 years in time to life in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. The film was conceived, written and directed by Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski, who has artfully blended archival footage taken by German cameramen as content for a Nazi propaganda film with images of a handful of survivors sharing painful memories of the Holocaust.

The 89-minute documentary was produced by Belfilms LTD with the support of the New Israel Foundation for Cinema and Television, Yad Vashem Project and YES Docu. It earned the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Best International Documentary Feature Award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival earlier this year. The documentary was subsequently picked up for theatrical distribution by Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Hersonski began her career as a freelance director and editor after graduating from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in 2003. She subsequently edited a weekly documentary program that aired on Channel 10 in Israel. A Film Unfinished was her first turn at the helm during production of a feature-length documentary.

The Warsaw ghetto came into being after the German army invaded and occupied Poland in April 1940. More than 400,000 Jewish people who lived in Warsaw were forced to live in a walled ghetto that occupied less than three square miles. Countless numbers of them  and more than 200,000 refugees who were brought to the ghetto, died of  starvation, typhus and other diseases. Most survivors were sent to almost certain death at Treblinka and other concentration camps.

An hour's worth of film footage was discovered in an East German archive at the end of World War II, with the title Das Ghetto written on the cans. The black-and-white film was produced by German cameramen who were brought to the ghetto in May 1942.  During the 1960s, a German historian, who was doing research about the ghetto in a Polish archive, found an entry permit given to a German cameraman named Willy Wist. In 1998, Adrian Wood, a British researcher, was looking for footage from the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in a vault on a US Air Force base in Germany, and he noticed two film cans on the floor titled Das Ghetto. Wood had years of experience with Holocaust footage, and what he had found was multiple outtakes of  scenes where German cameraman and S.S. guards accidentally got into backgrounds while other people were shooting. That film provided tangible evidence that scenes of Jews living the high life were staged propaganda.

"A Film Unfinished emerged out of my preoccupation with the notion of the perpetrators of war crimes creating an archive that testifies to the suffering of their victims," Hersonski says. "The systematic documentation of these horrors has changed forever how the past is archived. These images have been used in many films. In the worst cases, they have been presented as straight-forward historical truth."  

In 2006, Hersonski wrote a short essay outlining her ideas for a documentary and submitted it to Noemi Schory, an experienced film producer in Israel. That was less than a year after Schory had completed her work on the new Visual Center at the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, which includes more than 100 short films that use archival footage. Schory told Hersonski about a diary written by a 15-year-old girl, which describes a German camera crew making a propaganda film in the ghetto.

About a month later, Hersonski traveled to Jerusalem to watch a copy of the 62-minute rough cut of the Nazi propaganda film that was never released. "After so many years of being bombarded with films about the Holocaust, I was shocked that I didn't know anything about this film," she says. "Until you see it, you can't understand the evil behind its making, and the distorted ways it was used in dozens of documentaries after the war. I asked myself, How can a propaganda film shot from the point of view of the perpetrators of  a crime truly reflect the realities facing the victims?"

Hersonski traveled to Berlin to meet the archivists and learn more about the history of the footage. She discovered that approximately 90 percent of the film created by the Nazis was destroyed during the last days of the war. No documents were found revealing who initiated the propaganda film and why it wasn't completed.

Schory and Itay Ken-Tor, a producer/director, who has been worked at Belfilms since 2000 and managed the organization for the past three years, came on board as producers. Hersonski credits a "persistent" Israeli researcher for finding nine survivors of the crimes committed in the Warsaw ghetto. They were teenagers or younger during the war, and they now lived in Israel, England, Poland and the United States. She contacted them and asked if they would be willing to be filmed sharing memories and their thoughts while watching film found in the archives. "I explained in detail what they were going to see, and asked if they were absolutely certain they could stand the shock," Hersonski says. "I was relieved that five of them were more than willing to come. After every session, I was physically numb and mentally worn out. The four women who were filmed watching and commenting on the archival footage live in Israel. The only man [among the five participating survivors] died last year."

Willy Wist, one of the German cameramen who were brought to Warsaw to shoot Das Ghetto, also agreed to share his memories. He had been called to testify when the West German government prosecuted war criminals during the 1960s. "We had no idea of what was happening until we arrived," he recalls in the film. "The thought that these people would be systematically murdered never entered my mind. The SS brought us Jews whom they wanted us to film. We could see the fear on their faces." After 30 days, the film crews packed their gear and left. 

A Film Unfinished ranges from close-in shots of faces of starving adults and children to a staged scene in a restaurant where waiters are carrying trays stacked with food to show the world the paradise that rich Jews lived in. There are haunting close-ups of the faces of the survivors and Wist sitting in a darkened cinema, sharing their feelings as they watch images projected on the screen-such as people desperately searching for food in piles of trash at a garbage dump, while one of the survivors recalls doing that when she was ten years old. In another scene, Wist reminisces about filming a staged shot of an attractive woman looking in a mirror as she applies lipstick; shots like that one were designed to contrast with film of a shabbily dressed woman walking on the street, carrying her baby and begging for bread. Itai Neeman, an Israeli cinematographer, heightens the drama with intuitively sensitive composition and use of light and darkness playing on the faces and eyes.

The man whom the Nazis had appointed director of the Jewish Council was filmed sitting at his desk looking like a corporate executive. He obeyed the Nazis, but wrote entries in his diary expressing his feelings. Other people risked their lives by documenting history as it was happening, in their diaries-some of which, including the one maintained by the council director, were also found in archives. Hershonski had a narrator verbally punctuate images by reading appropriate words selected from the diaries. "A time will come when no survivors are left," she says. "The archival footage, unlike paper documents, bears a much more layered testimony regarding the realities it witnesses. It will remain as our source of understanding our history. The film will testify to the crimes that were committed and the suffering of the victims."

On August 5, despite appeals by Oscilloscope Laboratory president Adam Yauch, Hersonski and Hanna Abrusky, one of the survivors who appears in the film, the MPAA classification and ratings appeals board upheld an "R" rating for A Film Unfinished. The reason given was that the film contains "disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities, including graphic nudity."

The "graphic nudity" is a brief shot of a few naked men and women separately stepping into a pool, which the narrator describes as a ritual Jewish bath. It is a graphic example of how the Nazis staged shots designed to denigrate Jewish people.

Yauch argued to the MPAA that it is important for young people to see A Film Unfinished to learn a valuable history lesson. As George Santayana wrote in 1905, "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  

“The MPAA "R" rating is extremely unfortunate,” says Oscilloscope Laboratories co-founder David Fenkel. "Yael has created a really powerful film that has important educational value for people of all ages…especially young people who aren’t familiar with the history. We are still uncovering layers of history of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. This documentary provides an extremely unique and fresh perspective of what the Nazis did in terms of media manipulation.

“It’s disheartening that the MPAA has decided to make it difficult for young people to experience this film,” Fenkel continues. “It's really crazy, because there are films with extreme violence and sex that get PG-13 ratings, but apparently it’s okay to censor history. Sure, some of the images in this film are not easy to watch, but a lot of truth isn't necessarily easy to watch. We should leave the choice up to the parent and teachers who believe that it is important to educate children. The realities of an “R” rating make it more difficult. But, I believe this film is good and important enough to get a wide audience. I believe this story about World War II is going to become a topic of conversation this year and for years to come.”

A Film Unfinished opens August 18 in New York City and August 20 in Los Angeles.

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

Week 2 of IDA's 14th Annual DocuWeeks begins today with six films screening daily at the ArcLight Hollywood and at the IFC Center in New York. The Los Angeles lineup for August 6 through August 12 includes Apaporis, Louder Than a Bomb, My Perestroika, Steam of Life (Miesten vuoro), Summer Pasture and This Way of Life. Films screening through August 12 in New York include Budrus, For Once in My Life, HolyWars, Most Valuable Players, Pushing the Elephant and Quest for Honor.

Tickets are available online at the links above or at the ArcLight (6360 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood) and IFC Center (323 Sixth Ave @ W. 3rd St., New York) box offices.

Editor’s Note: Waste Land, an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, will be screening Saturday, February 26, at 4:00 p.m., as part of DocuDay LA at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills, and at 5:10 p.m. at DocuDays NY at The Paley Center for Media in Manhattan.

Over the past couple of weeks, we at IDA have been introducing our community to the filmmakers whose work is represented in the DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase, which runs from July 30 through August 19 in New York City and Los Angeles. We asked the filmmakers to share the stories behind their films--the inspirations, the challenges and obstacles, the goals and objectives, the reactions to their films so far.

So, to continue this series of conversations, here is Lucy Walker, director of Waste Land.

Synopsis: Waste Land follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio. There, he photographs an eclectic band of catadores--self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. Muniz's initial objective was to "paint" the catadores with garbage. However, his collaboration with them, as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage, reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Waste Land offers stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit.

IDA:  How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Lucy Walker: One winter, when I was about 21 years old and studying fiction filmmaking in grad film school at New York University, I went to stay with some friends--a bunch of young artists and writers in Galway, Ireland. I arrived early on New Year's morning, and they were still asleep. I was very excited to try my new, first-ever video camera. I filmed everyone as they slowly woke up, made tea on the old potbelly stove, smoked cigarettes while they washed the dishes from the party the night before, and discussed the year ahead; it was a little bit Withnail and I, a little bit Slackers, and I was having a lot of fun filming it.
I really liked the footage, and when I went back to New York I showed it to my beloved directing professor at NYU, Boris Frumin, who compared these kids to Jesus and his disciples (and I could see what he meant!) and encouraged me in my feeling that this was just as interesting as the fictional scenes I was working on. After that, I started compulsively documenting the most interesting young artists and musicians and activists I could find in New York, intending to make a film about their struggles. I ultimately decided it wasn't a sufficiently focused documentary to finish, but I had learned a lot and gotten the bug.

IDA: What inspired you to make Waste Land?

LW: I had finished my previous film Blindsight and was looking for a follow-up project. I was introduced to the artist Vik Muniz and had some very open, organic conversations with him about how we might collaborate to make a documentary. I didn't want to make a film that looked at all his different works like a wide-ranging retrospective art show;  brilliant as Vik's work is, that just doesn't offer a compelling through-line. I love films about art like Quince Tree Sun, which simply focus closely on the making of (or the failed attempt at making, in that film) one single painting.
I showed Vik Blindsight because I thought that one giant, challenging project would make the most dramatic structure for a documentary, as well as the most revealing approach to documenting his art-making process. And, like Erik Weihenmeyer going to Tibet to meet the blind Tibetan students and take them climbing in Blindsight, I challenged Vik to come up with the toughest possible project, one that would test him to the max as a human being, not simply as an artist.
I was stubbornly fixated on the fact that Vik had grown up in Brazil very poor, and had been shot in the leg, and the rich guy who had shot him paid him off with a lot of money, so he bought a plane ticket and came to the United States and pursued his dream of being an art photographer. I love how this story shows how fortune, or life, or fate, or the universe, or God, or whatever you call it, knocks us around in surprising ways. And it was pretty shocking to me how rich he was now; as an art photographer, he practically prints money. I thought it would be rich emotional territory for this rich, successful artist to confront the extreme poverty of his childhood.
I remembered watching Ilha Das Flores, a Brazilian movie about garbage, and learning about the catadores, or garbage pickers, from my friend Robin Nagle, who was in my triathlon club at NYU and taught an amazing seminar all about garbage. I had been so fascinated by Robin's work that I audited her class and went along to Freshkills landfill in Staten Island, and thought that it would make a genius location for a movie. This was long before Garbage Dreams, another beautiful documentary, so I guess I wasn't the only person to have this idea!
But this idea was perfect for us because Vik had previously done a series of works called Pictures of Junk\, which I found utterly captivating, and also a fantastic visual metaphor for how we can use documentary filmmaking to get very close to people who are normally so far away. For Vik to go to a landfill in Brazil and collaborate with the catadores there to make giant pieces of art seemed like the ideal story to follow to make a film, and once we had this idea, I stubbornly insisted on it, and then we had an amazing team to make it happen.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making this film, and how did you overcome them?

LW: Like all my films, this was an awful challenge! Not least because we had to work in the garbage dump--with all the attendant horrors of smells, dangers and threat of violence because of the favelas being controlled by drug traffickers and garbage dumps being used to hide guns, drugs and even dead bodies. I was terrified, but I knew that if people were working there every day, and if Vik wanted to go and work with them, then I should be courageous enough to go along and film it, because it was sure to be absolutely fascinating material.
I had so many vaccinations before I went that I could barely move my arms when I arrived in Brazil! And then I made the mistake of watching Manda Bala and showing it to our team, so then we had to go get kidnap insurance! Fortunately we had the most wonderful producer in Angus Aynsley, who believed unwaveringly in my talent and in Vik's, and who 100 percent supported our collaboration from the very beginning, including setting up all our conversations and financing our initial trips until we were able to make a trailer and raise production funds from the Brazilian government. We also had brilliant collaborators across the board, and I am really proud of the craft elements in the film--the cinematography by Dudu Miranda, the editing by Pedro Kos and the music by Moby.

IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the pre-production, production and post-production processes?

LW: In a way, the film is exactly what I was hoping for. And the film is structured in a very chronological way. I was very strict about filming everything, from the very beginning of Vik's thinking about the idea, so that the viewers can observe the absolute entire process from start to finish. And I insisted that nothing happened off-camera, so that we were filming things freshly as Vik was negotiating them.
This being my third documentary, I was happy that I had learned a lot of lessons the hard way and was able to implement them. In a way, the structure of Waste Land is very similar to those of Devil's Playground and Blindsight as I follow a fascinating group of characters on an extreme journey through a very inaccessible world (whether the Amish community or Mt. Everest or the garbage dump).
The moment when I knew it was going to work was when I got to Jardim Gramacho for the first time and saw Valter, the bard of the dump who uses rhymes to keep everyone going, cycling into the frame. His bicycle was covered in trinkets he had retrieved from the garbage. He honked a grubby eagle-horn and smiled at me. I couldn't believe how charming, funny, funkily dressed, eloquent and soulful he and the other catadores I met all were. And I knew that they would be the beating heart and soul of the movie.

IDA:  As you've screened Waste Land--whether on the festival circuit, or in screening rooms, or in living rooms--how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reactions?

LW: I guess the biggest surprise is that you have an idea and it actually works! Sometimes you can work really hard on something and it doesn't come together, but in this case our expectations were way exceeded. The people we met blew us away. Vik's project turned out to be the most magically transformative one imaginable. And the emotional reaction that the audience can feel about that is so gratifying. We've had a few charmed festival screenings where I've looked across and it seems like everybody's faces are wet, and the whole theater is crying...and of course, I am too because it makes it all so worthwhile.
But it's a slow build: The opening is the first part of a bookend that doesn't pay off until the very end, and I can watch people scratching their heads and wondering if they're in the right theater. But then when the ending does finally roll around, it really does pay off! Everybody who worked on the film could relate to having come through personal challenges where we felt our lives were "in the garbage," and that is a bond shared by the people in the movie, the people who made the movie, and now the people watching the movie.

IDA: What docs or docmakers have served as inspirations for you?

LW: So many! To name just a couple, Hoop Dreams and Streetwise are two films I point to as being especially influential when I was starting out wanting to make vérité films about young people. I couldn't believe the twists and turns of fate in Hoop Dreams--and I think Waste Land for me is really about these big forces that act on our lives, the moments when lives dramatically shift before our eyes.
Streetwise fascinated me because of the amazing trust and access the filmmakers achieved with the homeless young people in the movie. I just couldn't believe that the filmmakers were in the room during such intimate scenes, such as 14-year-olds falling in love or returning home or even dying, and it became the benchmark to aspire to in my own films.
I was lucky enough to study with Barbara Kopple and work for Beeban Kidron, and these two amazing women personally taught me a great deal. I was drinking in everything I could about how they tackled things, and still today their words ring in my ears. For example, Barbara once told me, "You always miss 99 percent of what you know you need, but don't worry; just keep going." And those words encourage me when I miss an important scene, as inevitably happens sometimes in the uncontrollable world of documentary filmmaking.
Pixote, a Brazilian film, was in my mind a lot making Waste Land, because it is such a stunning film about poor outcast young people in Brazil, and also because our wonderful sound recordist was the son of its writer.

Waste Land will be screening July 30 through August 5 at the the ArcLight Hollywood in Los Angeles and August 13 through 19 the IFC Center in New York City.

To download the DocuWeeks^TM program, click here.

To purchase tickets for Waste Land in Los Angeles, click here.

To purchase tickets for Waste Land  in New York, click here.

Editor's Note: For Once in My Life, which won the IDA/Mujsic Documentary Award last month, airs February 1 on PBS' Independent Lens. What follows is an interview we conducted with director/producer Jim Bigham and director/cinematographer Mark Moorman when the film screened as part of IDA's DocuWeeks^TM.

Over the past couple of weeks, we at IDA have been introducing our community to the filmmakers whose work is represented in the DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase, which runs from July 30 through August 19 in New York City and Los Angeles. We asked the filmmakers to share the stories behind their films--the inspirations, the challenges and obstacles, the goals and objectives, the reactions to their films so far.

So, to continue this series of conversations, here are Jim Bigham, director/producer, and Mark Moormann, director, of For Once in My Life.

Synopsis: For Once in My Life is a documentary about a unique band of singers and musicians, and their journey to show the world the greatness--and killer soundtrack--within each of them. The band members have a wide range of mental and physical disabilities, as well as musical abilities that extend into ranges of pure genius. In a cinema vérité style, the film explores the struggles and triumphs, and the healing power of music, as the band members' unique talents are nurtured to challenge the world's perceptions.

 IDA: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Jim Bigham:  I've always loved still photography and capturing that moment that can be suspended in time forever. I was greatly influenced by still photographers, people like Robert Frank. Looking at life as it is without manipulating it and putting those images together in order to tell a story or evoke an emotion was a direction that fascinated me early on. I was fortunate to be exposed to the area of editing docs while attending the London Film School. While being entrenched with several masters of the art there, I learned to appreciate the craftsmanship required in revealing the proper balance of information in a story. 

Mark Moormann: In 1988, in North Florida I met and shot a docu-travel video with Ned Deloach, author of the Diving Guide to Underwater Florida. Soon after, Ned invited me to travel with a group of cave divers he'd assembled to explore and shoot the underground aquifers of the Yucatan Peninsula for Hidden Rivers of the Maya. I shot all the topside 16-mm images and served as the camera technician on the underwater camera systems. I was a young guy at the time, and the expertise, professionalism and attention to detail these divers displayed made a lasting impression on me. On a side note, Wes Skiles, an underwater cinematographer on that expedition, died this week (July 21st) while shooting here in the waters off the Florida coast. RIP Wes Skiles.

IDA: What inspired you to make For Once in My Life?

MM:  I met Javier Pena while shooting a job. During our initial conversation I mentioned making documentaries, and at his urging I related some stories about the making of the music doc Tom Dowd & the Language of Music. He invited me to visit the Goodwill facility in Miami and check out the Spirit of Goodwill Band. I went down there with a camera and shot a band practice. It was obvious there was a terrific story there, with great potential, and I agreed to help Javier develop the project. Some time later, while meeting with director/producer Jim Bigham regarding a documentary I'd helped him shoot, I showed him a short demo of the film project. He and his wife, Cathy, were impressed with the band, and expressed an interest to get involved. We all met with Lourdes Little, executive producer of the film, and the project ultimately became a reality.

JB:  In our meeting, we set goals and determined we would make a film designed to appeal to mass audiences that would change pre-conceived notions about disabilities. We all realized at that time, we were signing on to a passion project.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making this film, and how did you overcome them?

MM:  One of the biggest challenges with any documentary film is getting the audience to care about the characters. In many cases with the Spirit of Goodwill Band members, that involved breaking down some very strong barriers born from preconceptions and misconceptions. At first glance it's easy for audience members (and society at large) to dismiss disabled people's ability to contribute in a meaningful way. While shooting the film, I think we made a real effort to capture the band members on camera as we would any other person. Over time, that allowed their personalities to come out, allowing the audience to relate to these individuals as they would any other person. In the end, it's the band members themselves who show us all how to overcome obstacles, especially when they are playing music for an audience, and their true essence emerges from behind the disability for the audience to see. 

IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the npre-production, production and post-production processes?<

JB: The things that didn't change were the focus of making a film about the characters and the need to tell it in an entertaining fashion. When we first started filming, the only plan was to capture these interesting characters and their music. We were hoping for the storyline to present itself. A couple months into it, we got a lucky break when Miami's mayor, Manny Diaz, along with Emilio Estefan, visited the band and the mayor invited them to play at a large, prestigious event. The film now had a path to follow. From there we found a natural build and a timeline of events to work with. At that point, we began working with Javier Pena on music choices. That meant choosing music where Javier could create interesting arrangements that made full use of all band members and their skills. By working with our editor, Amy Foote, we were able to find the links to keep the story progressing forward and reveal a progression in the characters as well. We tried to find the perfect balance between the music, the characters and the build-up of events. We chose to experiment with The Edit Center in New York, where we were editing, by allowing students to take pieces of the film and edit segments as a student project. It gave us some interesting feedback as to what a general audience might be looking for because it was difficult not to become too attached to all our characters and the moments that impacted us as filmmakers. We also did a couple private screenings to see what scenes had the most impact and to lose other moments that we felt were great but maybe didn't have as much to do with the story.

IDA:  As you've screened For Once in My Life--whether on the festival circuit, or in screening rooms, or in living rooms--how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reactions?  

JB: There's always fear when first showing your film to an audience; you never know what reactions you'll get. But I've been amazed at the strong response of our audiences at the festivals. We've only been in four festivals to date and have received five prizes, three of which were audience awards. Mostly I felt a gratitude and a humbling feeling from people as they watched and learned about the band members and their families. It was the same feeling I've experienced, and I was relieved that those feelings were conveyed. The film seemed to make people proactive. Everyone wanted to know how they could help the band and help the film to be seen. Many were grateful for exposing a sometimes uncomfortable subject in a unique way, and they praised Javier Pena for his work. I'm often surprised that audiences made up of all age groups and backgrounds have gone out of their way to express their love for this film, from young filmmakers and artists to seniors to working class, faith-based groups and more. On more than one occasion grown men have approached me in tears and have expressed that it really struck a chord. That's been absolutely awesome for me, and I feel privileged to have been able to be part of this story. From our positive experiences and a couple of rejections from festivals, we've learned a lot about finding the audience. Although we may not be the sexiest film out there, we do have a very wide audience and are figuring out how to market to them.  

IDA: What docs or docmakers have served as inspirations for you?

MM: I know Jim Bigham and I were both influenced by DA Pennebaker's work. Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop and The War Room all serve as a powerful reminders that as a filmmaker you can capture history-in-the-making, and if you don't, who else will? I was also influenced by the work of the Maysles brothers, and Albert personally taught me a valuable life lesson. I had the honor of sitting next to him on a Sundance panel featuring several distinguished music documentary filmmakers. After all the other panel members introduced themselves to the audience, it was my turn to speak. I had always been more than a little nervous in front of crowds, especially being in this very elite company, but I managed to introduce myself and speak about my film. Upon finishing, I looked beside me to see Albert staring at me with a sly grin. He picked up his microphone like it was a weapon, and told the audience, "He's going to be okay, because he's got respect for his subjects, unlike . . . ," before going on to excoriate a modern-day documentarian for a one-sided, unbalanced approach to making documentaries. The lesson learned? If someone hands you a microphone (or a camera), don't you dare be nervous or timid. You chose this career for a reason: To tell stories, to say what you've got to say, to tell the world a story that needs to be heard.

JB:  In addition to what Mark said, when conceptualizing the story behind For Once In My Life, there were two other films that kept coming up in the back of my mind.   think documentaries such as Jean-Luc Godard's, Sympathy for the Devil and even Milos Forman's narrative classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were both influences in structure and content.

For Once in My Life will be screening July 30 through August 5 at the the ArcLight Hollywood in Los Angeles and August 6 through 12 the IFC Center in New York City.

To download the DocuWeeks^TM program, click here.

To purchase tickets for For Once in My Life in Los Angeles, click here.

To purchase tickets for For Once in My Life in New York, click here.