Monica & David, which explores the marriage of two adults with Down syndrome and the family who strives to support their needs, earned the Best Documentary Feature award at the Tribeca Film Festival in a ceremony at the W Union Square in New York City.  The film, directed by Monica's cousin, Alexandra Codina, was praised by the jury for taking "an incredibly intimate situation and beautifully translates it in a way that makes you think about your own life. It's a clear and observant look at a family and the purity of love, fueled by an organic sense of the sadness, joy and everyday humor that fill this epic journey that is life."

Julia Bacha's Budrus, about a Palestinian community organizer who brings together members of Fatah and Hamas, as well as Israeli supporters to save their village from destruction, earned a Special Jury Mention. The jury deemed the film "a journey that stretches beyond borders to provide hope."

The Best New Documentary Filmmaker honor went to Clio Barnard, maker of The Arbor, about a housing project in Northern England, where playwright Andrea Dunbar grew up. Barnard has taken a bold step in rendering both the memory of the place and the memory of the late playwright, conducting audio interviews with those who knew Dunbar, then filming actors lip-synching the interviews, and staging scenes from Dunbar's plays on the street where she lived. The jury commented, "Imagination is a word you don't often associate with documentary filmmaking, but this director bends the boundaries of the form, beautifully crafting an innovative and detailed film wherein great storytelling is paramount."

The Best New York Documentary went to The Woodmans, by C. Scott Willis, about a family of artists beset with tragedy when their daughter Francesca, a well-regarded photographer, took her life at age 22. Travis Senger's White Lines & The Fever: The Death of DJ Junebug took Best Documentary Short honors, while Out of Infamy: Michi Nishiura Weglyn, by Nancy Kapitanoff and Sharon Yamato earned a Special Jury Mention. Of White Lines, which also won an award at SXSW, the jury said, "We chose a film that we feel effectively showed the evolution of hip-hop through its captivating visuals, riveting interviews and exciting exploration of the music and the culture behind the phenomenon."

America The Story of Us premiered April 25 on History to a record-breaking audience of 5.7 million-the highest rated program ever for the channel, according to an item in Worldscreen.com. This was the first of six two-hour segments that will air on successive Sundays through May 30.

"American history is a journey we all share and participate in," says Nancy Dubuc, president and general manager of History. "This documentary is a story about people with innovative ideas who helped to build the country from the ground up with ingenuity and determination."

The documentary series was produced by Nutopia. Executive producer Jane Root, founder and CEO of Nutopia, brought an eclectic background to this incredibly ambitious project. She was president of Discovery Channel from 2004 until 2007, and prior to that was controller at BBC2 for five years.

"The seed for this project was planted about 18 months ago when Michael Jackson [senior advisor at IAC New York] and David McKillop had a conversation about American history during an informal dinner meeting," Root says. "Michael is one of our board members and David is a producer for the History channel. We began production around a year ago.

 "It was enormous task summarizing 400 years of history into 12 one-hour segments," Root continues. "You think you know history before you begin a project like this, and then you discover that you don't know as much as you thought you did."

The creative team includes show runner Ben Goold, and Dubuc, McKillop and Julian Hobbs, executive producers for History. The historical consultants on the project are two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of books about American history, Professors Daniel Walker Howe and David M. Kennedy, as well as novelist/historian Kevin Baker.

"The scale was ambitious on lots of different fronts," Root explains. "Hundreds of people were involved. It's about the history of America, but we wanted it to be relevant for today's audiences. America has been through an enormous amount of change during  the past 18 months. This is a time when many people are interested in history."

The content includes dramatic re-enactments, some 360 computer-generated images, archival film, an narration by Liev Schreiber and what Root describes as a chorus of  58 voices of Americans from all walks of life sharing their memories and insights. The short list includes former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, conservative pundit Ann Coulter, Reverend Al Sharpton, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"There were no scripts," Root says. "Some on them spoke for hours. Colin Powell came in, sat down, and the first thing he said was that the great thing about America is the diversity of its people. The co-founder of Wikipedia [Jimmy Wales] spoke about how Silicon Valley was a little like the Gold Rush and oil prospecting."

The 12 episodes cover 400 years of American history, from the arrival of the first English explorers to Jamestown in 1607 to the 2008 election of Barack Obama-who introduced the first episode. In between, episodes cover the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, the westward expansion, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, the economic booms and busts, the two World Wars, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, Watergate and the digital revolution.

In conjunction with America The Story of Us, History has developed its most ambitious educational outreach program to date. The channel is offering free DVDs of the series to public and chartered elementary and high schools and certified colleges in the United States. The deadline for requests is July 1. For an application, click here. History partnered with the Library of Congress Educational Resources to develop materials in conjunction with the DVD distribution. In addition, History is collaborating with the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities to launch the Student Video Challenge, for middle school, high school and college students. Applicants will be asked to create a multimedia or video presentation, connecting their own stories to the larger story of American history. The winner will receive a $25,000 scholarship. History has also developed a Teacher Contest for Innovation in History Education, which also has a $25,000 prize in the form of grants and resources. For more on the America The Story of Us Educational Initiative, click here.

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

On Monday, April 26, reply comments were submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) concerning preservation of the open Internet and the broadband industry. The comments were submitted for the International Documentary Association, Film Independent, University Film & Video Association, Independent Filmmaker Project, IFP / Chicago, IFP Minnesota and National Association for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC).

The comments were prepared by Jack Lerner, Annie Aboulian and Daniel Senter of the USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic, under the guidance of attorney and former IDA Board President, Michael Donaldson.

The following is a summary of the reply comment filed with the FCC. A PDF of the complete 59-page document can be downloaded here:

SUMMARY

The Internet must remain open if there is to be a future for independent and documentary film. In recent years, the open architecture of the Internet has revolutionized independent and documentary film: it has fostered the development of new and innovative promotion and distribution channels, provided unprecedented access to rich source material, and made self-distribution of independent and documentary film feasible for the first time ever. To preserve the Internet as the preeminent platform for independent and documentary films, and the diverse, creative and often marginalized voices they bring to light, the Commission must promulgate clear and meaningful open Internet rules. As written, however, the proposed rules contain significant flaws that will undermine this objective and erect the same barriers to entry online that afflict documentary and independent filmmakers offline.

Before Internet distribution and promotion were possible, documentary and independent filmmakers had few available channels by which to share their films with the public. A small number of theaters, a few television channels, and the independent film festival circuit presented a very limited number of distribution and consumption outlets for documentary and independent film. In recent years, these opportunities were further limited by vertical integration and consolidation between and among studios, broadcast networks and cable channels. The Internet has lowered or removed many of these barriers to entry, and filmmakers have been able to extend the reach and run of their films in ways never before possible.

This sea change for documentary and independent film is critical to the preservation of free speech, investigative reporting and in-depth analysis, especially at a time when the traditional news industry is in decline and traditional media sources continue to consolidate and vertically integrate. Whether through an entertaining, character-driven narrative about the human condition, or through an investigation into corporate or political malfeasance, documentary and independent films reveal hidden truths, provide windows into our diverse experiences and cultural identities, and inspire the type of civic engagement and dialogue that is critical to democracy. If documentary and independent film is to continue to have this role, we must preserve the openness of the Internet.

We strongly support the goals that the Commission has articulated for this rulemaking and the adoption of the six proposed rules set forth in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). We are concerned, however, that the Commission might exclude a broad and virtually undefined class of "managed services" from the open Internet rules and that it would impose an overly broad "reasonable network management" exception, both of which would undermine the very openness that it seeks to preserve and that has been so critical to the Internet's success.

Furthermore, we are concerned that the proposed transparency rule does not require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to disclose their network management practices, and we urge the Commission to establish a discrete complaint procedure that is user-friendly, meaningful and efficient. If these provisions are not modified, documentary and independent filmmakers will again face an uneven playing field, and in the long run, the public will have far less access to documentary and independent film. We therefore offer four recommendations to remedy these deficiencies and to strengthen and clarify the rules proposed by the Commission.

First, we urge the Commission not to exclude a broad and undefined class of "managed services" from the purview of this rulemaking. To leave this category of services undefined is a recipe for misuse and abuse, and opens the door to the virtual elimination of competition online. To begin with, it is not clear that a pressing need exists for an exclusion of any kind, because the current best-effort delivery system has worked adequately thus far. Before the Commission establishes such an exclusion, it should wait until more research has been conducted to determine if further regulation is needed. More importantly, a vague or loosely defined exclusion would enable ISPs to institute a pay-for-priority regime in which content and applications from those with deep pockets would get a pass to a fast lane, while films and other content produced with little or no money for marketing and distribution would be relegated to the slow lanes. If a class of "managed services" is to be excluded from this rulemaking, the Commission should at the very least make clear that any such class must be defined based on the function of the services (e.g. video, teleconferencing, etc.), and not on who is paying for them. Finally, the Commission should require that managed services programs must be reviewed and monitored by the Commission on a case-by-case basis.

Second, the exception for "reasonable network management" (RNM) as written would severely undermine the six open Internet principles. The proposed exception would allow ISPs to ignore any of the rules promulgated here in order to "prevent the transfer of unlawful content; or prevent the unlawful transfer of content"-even though no adequate technology exists that can reliably determine at the ISP level whether content is lawful. Any rule that permits ISPs to install filtering or any other technology designed to ferret out infringing content under the guise of reasonable network management would inevitably cause significant amounts of lawful content, such as fair use material, to be blocked or slowed down. Worse, such technology is vulnerable to manipulation and may allow ISPs to engage in a range of non-neutral or anti-competitive activities under the banner of "reasonable network management." As copyright holders ourselves, we care deeply about the protection of copyrighted work--but this is the wrong way to go about it. We recommend that this exception be focused on technical efforts to promote network efficiency, and that the standard for what constitutes "reasonable" in the RNM definition turn on whether the activity is narrowly tailored to address a critically important interest.

Third, the Commission's proposed transparency rule should be made more robust by setting forth minimum standards for adequate transparency. We propose that ISPs be required to provide clear, comprehensive and easy-to-understand disclosure of any network management activity that may interfere with a user's service so that documentary filmmakers, independent filmmakers and others can quickly and easily determine whether or not transmission of their films has been throttled, slowed or blocked. Furthermore, we urge the Commission to remove the term "subject to reasonable network management" from the proposed transparency rule because that language would allow ISPs to avoid disclosing important information in a wide range of circumstances in the name of network management.

Fourth, the Commission should establish a complaint process that is user-friendly, meaningful and efficient. We recommend that the complaint procedure be simple and accessible via the websites of both the Commission and the ISPs, and it should apply uniformly to all broadband Internet providers. If a party making a complaint can make a reasonable showing of a violation, we propose that the burden should then shift to the ISP to demonstrate that its practice qualifies as reasonable network management. Finally, we suggest that the process require the Commission to respond to complaints within a set timeframe.

We understand that the Commission is reviewing its jurisdictional authority over matters related to this rulemaking in light of the recent Comcast Corporation v. Federal Communications Commission decision. The Commission is the appropriate agency to ensure that the Internet remains free and open, and we submit this Reply Comment under the assumption that the Commission either already has, or will be granted, the authority to conduct this rulemaking.

Submit your entry to be part of this program which enables documentaries to qualify for Academy Award® consideration and has helped champion wonderful movies throughout the years. Please read our 2010 Call for Entries page thoroughly for the fine details.

Then get involved and possibly be like these past DocuWeeks™ participants:

"[DocuWeeks] was a great experience and it really helped put our film, Severe Clear, on the map. Releasing the picture in New York and LA was major wind in our sails and I would urge any filmmaker who is lucky enough to be invited to participate to take full advantage of such a unique opportunity." -- Kristian Fraga, director of Severe Clear

"I found DocuWeeks to be a superb forum; great screens, wonderful audiences, and a fantastic team behind it all." --Mark Hopkins, director of Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders

"After months of living within the bubble of your film, you get to see it screen with the very best docs from around the globe. A thrilling experience!" --Frank Stiefel, director/producer of Ingelore

Get your movie in the mix now!

Read more about Requirements, Screening Options, Co-op Fees, Revenue Sharing and Digital Cinema Packages here.

To directly apply for IDA's DocuWeeks™ please use the online submission process at Withoutabox.com.

Today the US Supreme Court struck down a statute on First Amendment grounds that criminalized a lot of documentary filmmaking. Congress enacted a law to criminalize any depiction of any acts to animals in a film that results in the animals being killed or harmed, even if the activity on the screen is completely legal. Such a restriction would obviously cover hunting or fishing. The only requirement for prosecution was that the activity be illegal in the place that the film is possessed, exhibited or sold. Even though the act exempted serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical or artistic, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for an 8-1 Court decision, held the statute to be “substantially overbroad and therefore invalid under the First Amendment.”

Your IDA, along with Film Independent (FIND), the Independent Feature Project (IFP) and the Independent Film and Television Alliance (IFTA), filed an Amicus Brief to help the Court understand the threat to documentary filmmakers. The case involved a documentary filmmaker by the name of Robert J. Stevens, who had included clips of a legal Japanese dog fight in a film he produced. The government did not argue that Stevens shot the film or was even present at the shoot. Since dog fighting is illegal in the United States, Stevens was arrested, tried and sentenced to 37 months in federal prison--a term longer than Michael Vick received for actually participating in dog fights in the United States. Whatever one might think of Mr. Stevens and his films, the threat to filmmakers had to be removed. That is when IDA stepped in.

The case was brilliantly argued before the Supreme Court by Patricia Millet from the Washington, DC office of Akin Gump law offices. Former IDA President Michael Donaldson organized IDA’s participation in the case and recruited Film Independent, IFP and IFTA to join. He was in attendance at the hearing in Washington and joined other counsel after for a lunch honoring Millet’s hard work as lead counsel. Like Donaldson, she rendered her services on a pro bono basis.

It is essential that filmmakers in general, and documentary filmmakers in particular, receive the support they need from Congressionally funded groups like the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and they never will until they make their presence, and their role as true artists, known. For documentary filmmaking is indeed an art, and deserves to be recognized--and funded--as such. Taking our place at events such as Arts Advocacy Day is key to making sure that happens.

We began our day with a rousing pep rally featuring inspirational remarks from arts champion Louise Slaughter (D-NY), civil rights icon John Lewis (D-GA) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) who was presented with the Congressional Arts Leadership Award. Then we fanned out across Capitol Hill to take our case directly to the men and women who make the decisions about government funding for the arts in America.

I, along with representatives from Arts for LA and the LA County Arts Commission went to the office of Lucille Roybal-Allard, representative of House Congressional District 34 (downtown Los Angeles) to urge Roybal-Allard to support a budget of $180 million for the NEA in 2011, which would restore the agency to its 1992 funding level. The NEA provides critical support to our country’s nonprofit arts industry, and the IDA is determined to make sure that documentary filmmakers get their fair share of these funds.

We also asked Roybal-Allard to push Congress to appropriate $53 million for Arts in Education programs and to retain the arts in the definition of core academic subjects of learning. This designation is key to keeping the arts as part of our country’s educational system, and to ensuring that IDA’s high school documentary production program, Docs Rock, can expand to more high schools in Los Angeles and across the country.

I came away from the day’s events convinced that this kind of advocacy is vital to the future of the arts in America, and to the future of documentary filmmaking. Fortunately, this is exactly the kind of role that IDA was founded to play. In the days to come the IDA will continue to make the case for documentary filmmaking as a vital art form, and to seek ways to ensure that the artists who make documentaries get the funding they deserve. Meanwhile, I urge IDA members to do their part by going to the Americans for the Arts website at http://www.artsusa.org/get_involved/advocate.asp to send their own message to Congress about supporting the arts, including the art of the documentary film.

H'or d'oeuvres were served, drinks were consumed and some won great raffle prizes as the crowd chatted away into the night. Here are some fun pics from the evening.

See photos from past IDA mixers here, here and right here. 

Greed is good--but most would agree it is not. But what if it's greed for good? Washington, DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff began his political career as a conservative College Republican building a movement around Ronald Reagan's election and that president's fervor for smaller government. Thirty years later, Abramoff is serving time in Federal prison, convicted of multiple counts of fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion.

Abramoff's spectacular rise-and-fall is documented in filmmaker Alex Gibney's upcoming Casino Jack and the United States of Money. The music-driven, information-saturated exposé takes on the multi-faceted Abramoff, who represented interests from the Mariana Islands of the South Pacific to Russia, and became notorious for the $45 million he persuaded American Indian tribes to pay him for his lobbying efforts on behalf of the gaming industry.

"He was just a wild, larger-than-life character; he seemed to represent this out-of-control approach to money and politics," says Gibney, who decided to investigate the disgraced lobbyist, finding him spectacularly interesting, but not necessarily in a good way. "I think he is at the heart of a total breakdown of the system. He was not an exception to the rule; he was an exaggeration of business as usual." Abramoff's advocacy efforts on behalf of his clients at first pushed the boundaries of campaign finance laws but eventually crossed the line into illegal acts such as bribery, tax evasion-and perhaps even accessory to murder.

The film's subject dovetails well with two of Gibney's earlier projects: his Academy Award-wining Taxi to the Dark Side and the Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. "I seem to be interested in the process of corruption," he maintains, noting that Casino Jack tackles political corruption; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room examines economic corruption and Taxi to the Dark Side reveals spiritual corruption. 

"It gets in my craw when the powerful abuse the weak," Gibney explains of his choices. "I don't like it when people take more than what they are entitled to: that doesn't reckon with the fundamental idea of fairness that our society is supposed to be all about. The mistake is to think of Jack [Abramoff] as a bad apple, when he's the spectacular evidence of the rotten barrel." His fall became a convenient mechanism, whereby everyone else could say, "Everything is good now," when in fact it's worse, notes Gibney of the state of a US political infrastructure powered by political contributions rather than its citizens.

Gibney contends that Abramoff's earliest mindset was that of an idealist, but with the view that the ends justify the means. "People who are idealistic assume about themselves a kind of goodness, that cannot be besmirched by breaking a few rules here or there, so that's where they always get into trouble," he believes. Cutting corners eventually leads to greater transgressions.

Unlike Gibney's current untitled feature-length project on Eliot Spitzer (which will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival as a work-in-progress), Casino Jack's main idea has a certain simplicity: too much money in politics is a very bad thing. The Spitzer story is more complicated, and is structured more like a Greek tragedy, Gibney reveals. He believes the former New York Governor fell prey to the same hubris shown in the very executives he had once investigated. However, both films clearly demonstrate "the blood sport our political system has become," says Gibney.

The filmmaker was able to visit Abramoff at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, but the Department of Justice wouldn't approve filmed interviews. No audio recording or note-taking either ("Not even a pencil," says Gibney). Nor was he able to shoot in the US Capitol building: he had an idea for B-roll--janitors literally sweeping up the building--but that request to film was nixed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office. "They found that a threat to the Republic," the director laughs.

An immense amount of information is imparted in the briskly paced film, which has been edited down eight minutes since its premiere at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.  Because Abramoff was such a multi-tentacled operator, and traveled around the world on behalf of his clients, his peripatetic nature influenced the film's structure and cinematic style. There were numerous money trails to follow. And each of environments was captured in a different way, from a sweeping Steadicam shot of a casino floor, to an aerial overview of the tropical Mariana Islands to refracted, Cubist-like angles of Washington, DC.

Gibney also relied on film clips to illustrate the moral conflicts within US politics and lobbyists like Abramoff. Among the films excerpted are Frank Capra's iconic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Patton, a film lionized by the College Republicans; and a closing clip from The Natural, which speaks both to corruption and the mythic power of the American dream. Interviews were shot on HD, utilizing two cameras: one was placed directly in front of subject, the other at a 90-degree angle. "I like the shifting perspective," Gibney explains. "Sometimes you see interesting things in that hard-side angle." He also uses the second camera's footage to jump the angle within an interview rather than using an extraneous cutaway.

Gibney opted to narrate Casino Jack himself. "It feels more honest," he says. "I'm writing the copy; why not speak it?" In addition to the narration, Gibney and his team underscored the documentary's mix of news footage, interviews and film clips with a diverse soundtrack of contemporary, hip-hop and blues music by such artists as Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Costello and New Orleans' Wild Tchoupitoulas. Song choices reveal deeper truths and add a pulse to the film that Gibney describes as "a toe-tapping Greek chorus that comments on the action or reflects the place and environment."

Throughout Casino Jack, Abramoff's skills as a lobbyist are in evidence. Former staffer Neil Volz contends that his former boss "could sweet-talk a dog off a meat truck." One can only wish that he had turned his considerable talents to good. "Sadly, he defined good as doing what he did," Gibney maintains. Lobbying remains pervasive in Washington, and true campaign finance reform is not imminent. Campaigns are staggeringly expensive and time-consuming. Gibney suggests that nothing has fundamentally changed since the Abramoff scandal: "The biggest problem we have is that money is able to exert a force of power [on Washington] that's irresistible. We need try to find a way to take money out of politics; unless that happens we're done."

Casino Jack and the United States of Money is scheduled for release May 7 from Magnolia Pictures. Participant Media is handling the social action campaign.

Kathy A. McDonald is a writer based in Los Angeles.

Hanover House picked up North American rights to Marshall Curry's doc Racing Dreams, which follows the lives of three young racers as they compete in the World Karting Association's National Pavement Series. The film was named the best doc at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival and will be released in theaters Friday, May 21.

HBO has acquired the U.S. TV rights to the documentary Teenage Paparazzo, directed by actor Adrian Grenier. The film chronicles the true story of a relationship between 14-year-old paparazzo Austin Visschedyk and Grenier. The doc will debut on HBO this fall.

Oscilloscope Laboratories has acquired North American distribution rights to Yael Hersonski's doc A Film Unfinished, which deconstructs a Nazi-produced film about the Warsaw Ghetto. The film premiered at Sundance this year and won the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award. The film will open in August in limited release and a national release will follow.

The Cinema Guild has acquired video/VOD release rights to Agnes Varda's Cinevardaphoto, which is actually a trio of short films. The release date has been set for August 31.

Additionally, DOC: The Documentary Channel, a specialty channel that airs documentary programming announced it has entered into an agreement with DIRECTV that doubles the number of subscribers who can view DOC to 25 million.

The 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival gets a new neighborhood after four years in Westwood. Following the parent company's Film Independent's moving the Independent Spirit Awards from Santa Monica to Downtown LA this year (June 17-27), the high-profile festival will showcase its screenings in several venues there, with LA Live, the sprawling entertainment campus whose tenants include the Staples Center, Regal Cinemas and the Grammy Museum, among others, serving as the designated hub. The festival will also present its screenings and events at the REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), the Downtown Independent, the Orpheum Theatre and California Plaza. And LAFF will continue its tradition of nighttime screenings at the outdoor John Anson Ford Amphitheater in Hollywood.

"The festival's move to downtown Los Angeles allows us a unique opportunity to celebrate the history and future of our City," said Festival Director Rebecca Yeldham in a statement. "Our new location will continue to pave the way for LAFF to realize its potential as an international destination event, and unites our filmmakers and audiences with the diverse arts community that exists downtown.

LAFF is currently working on the fine details of the move, including tackling the high-price of parking downtown. Elise Freimuth, publicity manager at Film Independent, the parent company of the Los Angeles Film Festival, says "We've actually negotiated a parking rate for Festival patrons at LA Live: It will be $5 for the first 4 hours and $8 for the whole day...Plus, we're arranging free shuttles on the weekend to go between the venues."

More updates to come as they are announced. Get more information at the Los Angeles Film Festival website.