According to the buzz at the bagel bar, the first-ever WestDoc Conference exceeded everyone's expectations, thanks to a remarkable lineup of panelists...who were often hanging out at the bagel bar.

"There was a more relaxed schedule and atmosphere here than you see at other conferences," said filmmaker Chuck Braverman, who co-founded WestDoc with Richard Propper of Solid Entertainment. "The heavy hitters are out in the hall here schmoozing and networking. You don't see that at the other conferences." 

Braverman and Propper created WestDoc as the first forum designed specifically to serve documentary and reality TV professionals. "These two genres are very closely related," Propper asserted, "and no one's addressing this bandwidth."

Based on how crowded the panels were, it's an idea whose time has come. "I think we're going to have to find a bigger venue," confided Braverman, squeezing past the crowd at the "Power Programmers" panel, where broadcast execs revealed the secrets behind getting shows on their channels. 

WestDoc's power lineup included executives from Independent Lens, Sundance, NBC, ABC, Fox, Documentary Channel, Discovery, Bravo, TLC, Animal Planet, History Channel, National Geographic, ESPN, WE, Planet Green, The Travel Channel and MTV. Just about the only outlet that didn't fly an exec to Santa Monica was that NASA channel that broadcasts from a camera on the side of the Space Shuttle.

"The most senior executives are coming to this event," said filmmaker Peter von Puttkamer of Gryphon Productions, who works with Discovery, Animal Planet and History Channel. "And they're sitting down with the people. They're even going to the cocktail parties."

WestDoc also featured power filmmakers. On the doc side there was Ondi Timoner (DIG!; We Live in Public), Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price; Outfoxed) and Kirby Dick (Outrage; This Film Is Not Yet Rated).

On the reality side, there was TLC's executive vice president Steve Cheskin (the man who invented Discovery Channel's "Shark Week"); Tom Rogan of Authentic Entertainment (Ace of Cakes; Toddlers and Tiaras); and even William Morris vet John Ferriter (the man behind the deal behind Who Wants to Be a Millionaire).

The keynote speakers were R. J. Cutler (The September Issue; 30 Days; American High) and reality's current king, Thom Beers (Deadliest Catch; Monster Garage). Beers gave a very candid talk about everything from how he built his empire to what gets him chased off the road by the end of every season of Ice Road Truckers (seems he just can't resist that footage of truckers peeing...while driving). Cutler dished the dirt about making The September Issue and dancing the divide between documentaries and reality. 

The most popular panel for the doc crowd was "How to Get on PBS If You're Not Ken Burns," which decoded the maze of roads that lead to PBS. The conference also featured case studies of Food, Inc. and Anvil!: The Story of Anvil.

Just as Propper and Braverman had hoped, the doc and reality communities had plenty to commingle about. "The crossover to me is an easy one," said Biggest Loser producer J. D. Roth of 3 Ball, explaining why he called up director Kristopher Belman after seeing his LeBron James doc More Than a Game. "I think he'd be great in reality television," Roth exclaimed. "A good storyteller's a good storyteller."

This is just what Marissa Aroy wanted to hear. She won an Emmy for her PBS doc Sikhs in America, but she's suffering from grant fatigue. "I live up in the San Francisco Bay Area near Berkeley with a bunch of longtime documentary filmmakers," Aroy explained. "They had great careers, in the '70s, '80s. That kind of PBS career documentary lifestyle does not exist anymore." That made her "reality curious." Before she left WestDoc, she managed to snag 15 minutes alone in the lobby with Steve Burns, executive vice president of her favorite channel, National Geographic.

Which was great, as far as Burns was concerned. "We rely on the wonderful ideas and innovations of great independent filmmakers," Burns maintained. "I think that Chuck and Richard have done a great thing bringing WestDoc to LA. I was pleased to come."

Even vets like Puttkamer made hookups in the lobby. "If you've been at it for a while you do know the people," he explained. "But it's nice to sit down with people you haven't seen for a while and do face-to-face meetings." Before he left WestDoc, Puttkamer had turned an e-mail pitch "no" into a lobby "yes."

Day three of WestDoc was dedicated to a "Pitch Fest." Although Richard Saiz of ITVS and Tom Neff of Documentary Channel seemed open to just about any one-off with a great story, the fate of series still seems to hang on colorful characters who stir things up.

But fans of "observational" documentaries will find comfort in what an MTV exec had to say in the "Future of Reality TV" panel. According to senior vice president Brent Haynes, kids today are tired of "overproduced" shows. So MTV invested heavily in The Buried Life, a new series about community service--produced by doc folk. 

You can hear what you missed with the audio version of WestDoc, which will go on sale on the WestDoc website in November.

For a complete list of panelist bios, click here.

Elizabeth Blozan is freelance writer and director of the documentary Rebel Beat: The Story of LA Rockabilly. She can be reached at betty@betty-vision.com.

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In an era when everyone is trying to make sense of the new independent film landscape, the 31st edition of the Independent Feature Project (IFP)'s Independent Film Week (IFW), which ran September 19 to 24, in New York City, shined a light on the processes, pitfalls, partnerships and promising results for the filmmaker ready and able to master multiple disciplines. One could argue this year's event actually kicked off on September 18, with Eugene Hernandez' comprehensive historical overview of IFP in indieWire, highlighting the organization's place in the independent film pantheon. It was the perfect précis to the week, spotlighting IFP's accomplishments, evolution, and smart adaptive facility to meeting the ever-changing needs of today's filmmakers. IFP uniquely provides the right counsel and connections for works-in-progress, through career-spanning creative and business relationships, while providing a realistic state-of-play of the industry.  

IFP's Filmmaker Conference & Spotlight on Documentaries

The Fashion Institute of Technology was bustling, as the usual icons of the industry--producers, funders, distributors, broadcasters, sales agents, festival programmers and others--shared their wisdom on what filmmakers need to do for their projects to succeed. The Filmmaker Conference featured daily back-to-back panels ranging from the nuts and bolts of production, to exhibition and sales, to outreach and crowd-sourcing.  Wednesday's day-long documentary focal, "The Truth About Non-Fiction," provided insights on funding, audience development and emerging trends. Meanwhile, hundreds of other buyers, commissioning and sales agents bunkered down with filmmakers in the Project Forum, for highly targeted matchmaking courtesy of the IFP team. The week saw alliances made, presentations of artistically excellent works-in-progress, and a healthy dissection of the independent film environment: It's a buyer's market, be prepared to do everything, here's how. Milton Tabbot, IFP's senior programmer--and the heart and soul of IFP's documentary program--balances the doom and gloom prognosticators against the "great new world" optimists by taking a more philosophical view, referencing Jonathan Demme's oft-quoted quip, "La Luta Continua," and Spike Lee's "by any means necessary": The work has always been hard, is hard, and will always be hard, but the struggle endures and great films are being made and seen. With so many industry visionaries offering commandments on distribution, outreach and other aspects of filmmaking, I asked Tabbot for his as they relate to project inception:

• Commandment One: Be very familiar with other works in your subject area.
• Commandment Two: Beware of overworked subject areas.
• Commandment Three: Inarticulating your project, make sure your description reflects what you have to show on screen.

Tabbot, a 15-year veteran of IFP, has also commented that one of the more rewarding aspects of his job is both seeing a large number of veteran documentarians working at such a high level artistically, and discovering new works from emerging filmmakers. The great equalizer for veterans and neophytes alike is that they all start from scratch when presenting new work in Independent Film Week's signature program, the Project Forum.  Of the 117 projects selected in the Emerging Narrative, No Borders and Spotlight on Documentaries sections, 80 were documentaries. There was an even split of emerging to veteran entrants this year, with 40 percent alumni who had attended previously with other projects.

Several veteran projects created waves if not raves, including Fame High, directed and produced by Scott Hamilton Kennedy (The Garden); In The Matter of Cha Jung Hee, directed by Deann Borshay Liem; Poor Consuelo Conquers the World, directed by Peter Friedman (Silverlake Life; Mana: Beyond Belief); Magic Camp, directed by Judd Ehrlich (Run for Your Life; Mayor of the West Side); Hungry in America, directed by Kristi Jacobson (Toots) and Lori Silverbush (On The Outs); and Earth Camp One, directed by Jennie Livingston (Paris Is Burning).

Popular projects from emerging filmmakers, many of whom have been toiling on shorts and work-for-hire productions, included Tyler Measom and Jennilyn Merten's Sons of Perdition; Cameron Yates' The Canal Street Madam; and Yael Luttwak's My Favorite Neoconservative. 

Other projects to keep an eye out for include Nina Davenport's Sequel to Always A Bridesmaid (working title) and Queen of the Sun, directed and produced by Taggart Siegel (The Real Dirt on Farmer John).

What is Independent Film Week like for a first-time filmmaker? Fambul Tok director Sara Terry notes, "As a first-time filmmaker, I wasn't sure what to expect, although the way IFW is set up--with industry people actually asking to meet you--is great. You go into meetings knowing that somebody already has an interest in what you're doing. We met with top programmers for national and international TV, as well as several festivals, and the feedback was strong. We're now in serious conversations that could lead to substantial financial support to finish the film. To have that kind of access to so many key players in the doc world, all in one place over one week, is incredible."

The Good Pitch

IFP hosted the third and final installment this year in North America of The Good Pitch, a newly-evolved pitching forum that has the documentary cognoscenti abuzz. Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundations' Jess Search, Katie Bradford, Elise McCave, Beadie Finzi and Maxyne Franklin; outreach impresario Sandi DuBowski; and many others from Sundance Institute and Working Films ensured that this forum reflected the best strategy and outcomes for the participating films. Having concluded its North American tour, The Good Pitch team is now tallying accomplishments since convening at Hot Docs and SILVERDOCS earlier this year. The team contacted over 1,700 foundations, philanthropists, grantmaking associations, leading NGOs and nonprofits, broadcasters, media funders, traditional and digital media platforms, technology innovators, and federal, state and local governments, inviting them to convene and form alliances around social justice films. Over 60 documentary projects applied, with 21 projects selected, and filmmakers presented their work to over 300 organizations. The sessions should be required viewing--to see what it looks like when the right mission-match occurs, and hear how different entities respond to the material, sometimes in surprising ways.

The Good Pitch team will be tracking results and provide annual updates on the selected films as they make their way through production, distribution and outreach campaigns.  Several concrete partnerships were forged: 

• At Hot Docs, Gucci Tribeca Fund came on board with Beth Murphy's The Promise of Freedom.
• At SILVERDOCS, Art Stevens of the Calvert Foundation pledged $10,000 for an outreach campaign for Megan Gelstein's Green Shall Overcome, and he is now working on a fundraiser for the project. 
• SILVERDOCS also saw Debra Anderson's sale of Split Estate to Discovery's Planet Green, while the Hungry in America team established NGO partnerships that can be firmlycounted in the "now married" column. Executive Producer Ryan Harrington noted that the anti-hunger NGOs assembled at SILVERDOCS raised $350,000 in funds for the film since June.
• Since their pitch at SILVERDOCS, Joe Wilson and Dean Hammer, producers of Out on the Silence, have raised $150,000 in outreach funds. 
• At IFW, at the conclusion of Michael L. Brown's pitch for 25 to Life,Catherine Olsen of CBC leaped up from the audience to commit to a pre-buy. While it is too soon to capture IFW results in full, everyone will be watching to see what's next with this dynamic group.

Dan Cogan of Impact Partners noted that an unexpected benefit of the Good Pitch process has been the building of a community among funders. Similarly, Greenpeace's Pablo Mathiason underscored the important advantage to seeing new works early in development for campaign building. There is talk that the pitching forum will repeat in 2010, which is exciting news for the social issue documentary community.

While no one knows what is in store in the year to come--and which films will soar or flail--nor which festivals, distributors, critics, broadcasters or theaters will thrive, we do know we will see and hear the state-of-play for documentary from the industry's brightest--with their strategies for survival--at IFP's Independent Film Week.

Jody Arlington is managing partner of PR Collaborative and co-founder of The Impact Arts + Film Fund.

While Barack Obama's historic trek from the Illinois State Senate to the US Presidency was reported by hundreds of journalists covering the campaign trail, a new documentary, By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, which premieres November 3 on HBO, provides an insider's version of events.

Filmmakers Amy Rice and Alicia Sams, who produced and directed the film, had a front-row seat to Obama's amazing rise from underdog to frontrunner to victor and made the most of their incredible access to capture many never-before-seen private and personal moments with his family, campaign staff, organizers and volunteers.

"When we started shooting, all the odds were against Obama," says Rice, who also served as cinematographer on the documentary. "But he and his team kept their eyes on the prize, and our hope is that future generations, whether Democrat or Republican, can show their children and they can learn and gain something from this amazing story."

"We never tried to editorialize," adds Sams, "but we kept everything in the moment and just showed how it happened--how someone gets elected, the good times, low points, all of it." 

The finished film, as actor Edward Norton, one of the film's producers, puts it, is as much a portrait of a man as it is a portrait of a movement.

Other than Obama (and his wife, Michelle), Robert Gibbs, the communications director on the campaign and now White House Press Secretary, emerged as a character in their film along with Ronnie Cho, a young campaign field staffer. The filmmakers followed Cho from Texas to Indiana and Maine, as he moved up in the campaign. By the general election, he was promoted to a managerial position (He now works as assistant director of legislative affairs at the Department of Homeland Security.).

"We met him during our first trip to Iowa," says Sams. "He was charming, enthusiastic and good on camera. We just kept developing the relationship, but we didn't know about his background until close to Caucus night." Cho's family had emigrated from South Korea, and lived in a car for about a year of his young life; Cho was the first in his family to attend college. His cathartic release while on the phone with his mother during several key points of the campaign are very powerful, and he and the other staffers worked so hard, driven by their belief in Obama and his message of change and hope. 

Rice herself was also inspired by Obama, well before he became a contender for the presidency. A graduate of New York Universty, Rice, who grew up in Oklahoma, worked as a cinematographer on documentaries that aired on Sundance Channel and Discovery Health. In 1998 she co-directed her first documentary, From Ashes, about the challenges facing an AIDS hospice in Southern India.

While Rice knew she wanted to be a filmmaker, it was losing her older brother, David, who worked in the World Trade Center, on 9/11, that served as her political awakening and radically changed her perspective. So, when her other brother, Andrew, called her, wowed by then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama speaking at the Democratic Convention in 2004, she quickly turned on the television to watch his speech. "I was so impressed," she recalls. "I saw him as my generation's Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy, and I also thought he could be the first African-American president."

The next day Rice bought Obama's book Dreams of My Father, and the seed for the documentary was planted. In the fall of 2005, Rice called Sams, whom she had met when they both volunteered for the Change for Kids Collaborative Documentary, a series of short films addressing the issues facing New York City elementary schools.

"I'm 12 years older than her and much more cynical," Sams admits. "So while I thought her idea for a doc was a good idea, I didn't share her belief that he would run for president or that he could win." Sams began her career working on documentaries for PBS and has executive-produced Amreeka and Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen's, and produced Toots and Hello He Lied, and Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches for AMC.

By the end of January 2006, Rice and Sams had hammered out a proposal, while Rice continued to write letters and call Obama's US Senate office, to no avail. Realizing she needed a new plan of attack, she turned to her politically active friends Stuart Blumberg and Norton, partners (along with William Migliore) in Class 5, which has produced films like Down in the Valley, The Painted Veil and the upcoming Leaves of Grass. They were on board and in April Rice and Norton were on a train to Washington, DC to meet with Gibbs, Senator Obama's head of communications at the time, and Obama's press secretary, Tommy Vietor. By May 2006, the filmmakers had received the go-ahead to begin shooting.

At the start, Sams and Rice shot about once a month, approaching the project like a political diary, a day in the life of a US Senator. But they did travel with Obama to Africa in August 2006, where his visit included going to a clinic in Nyangoma-Kogelo near where his father grew up. They also shot him watching the 2006 mid-term elections, which is one of the opening scenes in the documentary, where Rice's brother Andrew won a seat as an Oklahoma State Senator.

"It was while shooting during the promotional tour for his new book, The Audacity of Hope, when we started to sense something was up," says Rice. "His appearances were drawing huge crowds of people, many of whom were wearing ‘Obama Run' pins."

Obama announced his candidacy for US President on February 10, 2007, and a few weeks later, the filmmakers showed up at campaign headquarters in Chicago to shoot some wide shots of the war room. But Gibbs informed them that they may not be able to shoot anymore.

The key to their access was definitely their early start and making a good impression, and also due to Senior Campaign Strategist David Axelrod. "Once we won him over, he was great, and to his credit he never wavered," says Sams. David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, also came on board. "We were shooting nine months before [Obama] announced, but we were always nervous about losing our access and somebody coming in and taking over," Rice notes. 

Certainly access ebbed and flowed, and due to budgetary and logistical issues, Rice and Sams had to make the most of their days shooting. "We had to choose what we really wanted to shoot and go from there," says Sams. "We weren't privy to his schedule enough in advance either, so we tried to listen and figure out what was coming up."

From the beginning, the filmmakers knew that this was going to be a small production and that they would serve as crew. "We had to do it this way to save money and make it intimate because there was no way, security-wise, that different camera people could show up," Sams maintains.

The filmmakers moved to Iowa and stayed there through the Caucus, which Obama won in January, and several of their filmmaker friends arrived to shoot some of the action. "We stayed in these little dorm rooms at a local college to save money and to be close enough to get to Obama's offices for the staff calls every night," says Sams.  

"We figured if we hung around long enough they would forget about us," Rice maintains. "And they did. And even though the campaign staff was trained to never speak to the press, we reminded them that we weren't press, so they eventually let down their guard." 

"This wasn't about a lot of ego or us being filmmakers," adds Sams. "We just tried to be there and be quiet and just keep showing up. But we definitely worked very hard to put ourselves in a situation where accidents could happen." 

One of those magic moments happened during a rally on the day Obama's grandmother died, and it's a rare showing of emotion that only Rice and a few others captured. "It's misty and chilly and the press are in the back on risers while I'm shooting with my tiny camera along with other still photographers in the photo buffer--and a tear comes down his cheek," Rice relates. "I get back on the bus and I'm waiting for the rest of the press to talk about this moment--and nobody does. They didn't get it because they were either too far back or the angle wasn't right." 

Remaining focused on the shot was often hard when it would have been easy to get swept up in the moment, like on election night. Their last day of shooting was with President Obama in the Oval Office.

"All throughout the film, the joke was Obama saying to us, ‘Oh, you guys are still around,'" Rice notes. "But on this last day, maybe because we had believed in him so early on and stuck with him, he just asked us what we wanted to shoot." 

By then, he'd also seen a cut of the film. "He really liked it but said, ‘I think it's great when Ronnie [Cho] and Mike [Blake, on the campaign staff; he is currently Associate Director for the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.] cried; you should put in more of them, and less of me.'"

After all the time spent around him, they never caught him smoking, but Sams was most surprised at Obama's consistency in demeanor: "He was calm and controlled and he's a very centered person and able to keep his cool." 

She was impressed with Michelle, too. "She's a great mother and is truly his partner in life. She doesn't sublimate her personality to his."

With 700 hours of footage, editing the film was a challenge--partly, Rice said, because we already knew the ending so it became how to keep the audience engaged. While they had talked with several editors in March 2007,  the top choice was Sam Pollard (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and Eyes on the Prize). But he wasn't interested because he didn't think Obama had a chance to win. His viewpoint changed, however, and in June 2007, he began screening footage, eventually cutting chronologically so the filmmakers could see it all play out again before they started discarding.

The filmmakers didn't spend time trying to find a distributor; HBO bought the film, practically sight unseen. "They saw it as a moment in history and they're the only ones who have it," says Sams.

Coming a few months shy of his first year in office, the timing for the documentary couldn't be better. It's a reminder of his enormous achievement and how much hope echoed from Grant Park in Chicago and throughout the country on election night, one that captivated and enthralled a nation. Screenings will be held in New York, Atlanta and in Chicago at the Cadillac Theater on October 30, prior to the premiere on November 3. The DVD will come out in January.

"I'm so happy with this film and so proud of it," says Rice. "I remember when my brother died and so many people came up to me and told me that something good would come of this pain. I realized my good is this film.

"It was so fulfilling making this film," Rice continues. "But I remember walking home after we finished post; I was fighting off tears, and I went through a real depression. It was hard watching all of their stories go on without us. But now that it's going to air on HBO--a filmmaker's dream--I'm ready to celebrate."

Shelley Gabert is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer covering entertainment, travel and culture.

Good Hair, the Chris Rock-driven exploration into the African-American community's longtime fixation on all things tonsorial, opened at $1,117,000-an impressive per-screen average of over $6,000. For the record, Jeff Stilson directed that Rock doc, just as Davis Guggenheim helmed what was annoyingly referred to as "that Al Gore documentary." And the latest Davis Guggenheim documentary, It Might Get Loud, is showing signs of slowing in its second month of release, picking up a little over $100,000 in the past week as it creeps up on Every Little Step and Valentino: The Last Emperor. 

And the Michael Moore juggernaut continues to surge. Right now, only Earth stands in the way. Of course, there's that other Michael, who, in a scant two-week-long theatrical run starting October 28, might well surpass both Earth and Capitalism. No mean feat for The dearly departed Gloved One.

1) Earth                                               $32,011,576

2) Capitalism: A Love Story                   $  9,095,000

3) Food, Inc.                                        $ 4,380,706

4) The September Issue                        $ 3,184,000

5) Waltz with Bashir                              $ 2,283,849

6) Valentino: The Last Emperor:            $ 1,755,134

7) Every Little Step                               $ 1,725,141

8) It Might Get Loud                              $ 1,345,000

9) Good Hair                                        $ 1,117,000

10) Tyson                                            $    887,918

Source:www.boxofficemojo.com (as of October 12, 2009)

The Yes Men Fix the World chronicles the audacious pranks of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, who pass themselves off as representatives of Dow Chemical Company, Exxon and Halliburton, appearing at industry conferences and, remarkably, on the BBC--all in an effort to expose the impact of capitalism on society and the environment. In between their jaw-dropping activities, they interview economists and others at free-market think tanks to examine the underpinnings of capitalism. And connecting all of these episodes are humorous, scripted scenes with the Yes Men, mostly shot in various locations in upstate New York. Bichlbaum and Bonanno directed the 90-minute documentary with Kurt Engfehr (co-producer and editor of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine). The film had its television broadcast premiere on HBO in July and opens in theaters this month through Shadow Distribution. Documentary interviewed Bichlbaum at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July.

Documentary: Why did you decide to have the television broadcast on HBO before the theatrical release?

Andy Bichlbaum: HBO said, "If we can show it first, we'll give you a lot of money, and if we show it afterwards, we won't give you very much money."

D: How much money did they give you?

AB: $400,000. We're making a calculation. Nobody really knows how these things work. We're just figuring, Well, we'll try it and have fun with it.

D: The 2003 documentary The Yes Men was directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price. What prompted you and Mike Bonanno to make your own documentary?

AB: Well, after that experience, which was great and easy because all we had to do was do these actions, we kept getting invitations for things and we kind of moved in this more concrete direction. The first thing that happened was that one of our friends at Greenpeace suggested [that we do] the same sort of thing, but around the Bhopal issue, and try to make Dow take responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe. [In 1984 Union Carbide, now owned by Dow, released tons of toxic chemicals in the air, killing thousands of people.] And that's when we set up the Dow [web]site, got invited on the BBC and so on. When we got invited on the BBC, we realized we had a whole other movie. And for one reason or another, we just decided to do it ourselves.

With The Yes Men, we had a lot of input; we talked a lot with them. So we thought, Why not throw it together ourselves? We didn't realize what an absolutely crazy, murderous process making a movie is. I'm not sure we would have done it if we had; I wouldn't have done it. But I'm really glad that we did. We decided that in addition to documenting actions and our own thing in it, we would primarily go and talk to victims and bring awareness of these struggles and link the actions to the struggles really directly. So we would go to India after appearing on the BBC. We would go to New Orleans to do a thing about New Orleans. Everything that we do, we wanted to document it a lot and cast it against this backdrop and interview the bad guys as well. So there was a very ambitious plan, a lot of things that we wanted to do very specifically, so we thought, Well, we better just make it ourselves.

D: So you started filming when you got the invitation to appear on the BBC as a representative of Dow.

AB: Yes, that was the first one. We got promised a bunch of money by Arte France right then. They said, "We'll help you make this movie. We'll give you $200,000." And I thought that sounded really great, but then it turned out we couldn't really access that money. They didn't trust us until we had a complete finished film in the can and could say, "Here's the film, we've done it." But they still wouldn't give us the money until we had licenses for everything. It was a really horrible experience. We had to jump through so many hoops. We wasted weeks and weeks of time that we could have spent making the movie, trying to access this money. It was just really stupid. So for somebody who wants to make a movie, I would say, Don't waste your time looking for money. Just make it and then you'll be happy. You'll own the film afterwards.

If we had kept those rights in France and Germany, we would have been able to sell to broadcasters and do a theatrical [release] in those countries. We would have made a lot more money than we made with this "fake" production money.

D: So they thought because you were first-time filmmakers, you wouldn't work out?

AB: Yeah, nothing could make them trust us. It's a really corrupt funding system in France, in Europe and in the US. We didn't do that much better in the US either, with funds we were promised. The one exception was in Britain. The Channel 4 Brit Doc Foundation gave us $100,000; they actually delivered half of it two weeks after they promised it to us, and the rest incrementally. So they enabled [the film] to be made.

D: What was Arte's role?

AB: They're our broadcaster. They're putting it on French TV and German TV. They haven't been willing to move that so we could also do a theatrical. And they weren't willing to give us any money until the film was completely finished. So really, we got pretty much screwed by that whole deal by taking their help. After the film was finished, they gave a lot of money to do the color correction and all that stuff. But what we really needed the money for was to make the film, not to do the color correction. [laughs] About $60,000 went to the French producer, so we ended up with about half the money that was promised. We would have ended up with a lot more if we'd just kept the rights and sold it to a broadcaster like them, who would have paid that much, and a theatrical company. Live and learn.

D: So how were you able to fund it if you didn't get any initial financing?

AB: Well, our day jobs; we both teach at universities. And we would also write to our mailing list and say, "Help! Send us a little money we need to build a prop or something." There are those Survivaballs; we got them built from $5,000 from our mailing list. The movie was really, really cheap to make--up until the point when we had to finish it and do all the processing and post-production.

D: When did you actually start shooting?

AB: In 2004, when we did this BBC thing. We just went ourselves. Mike shot. I went in, [and appeared on the BBC]. We did some follow-up, some vérité. The 2003 film is all vérité; there's no narrator. It's all Mike facing the camera saying things. With this one, we decided we wouldn't bother with that. We would just film what happened and we'd think of the "glue" and how to hold it together afterwards. We were kind of aware of a plot in our heads as we were going along and we angled towards the deep issues we wanted to talk about in the film.

D: When did you decide when you would put in these stylized, humorous, transitional scenes?

AB: That was the idea of Kurt Engfehr, our co-director. We were wrestling together with him on how to build this film--how to make it, actually. Kurt had the brilliant idea: Let's go to "Absurdland." It doesn't matter that we don't have any footage of you guys thinking. We'll just recreate it in this completely stupid environment.

So we went underwater. We went to broken-down factories. We even shot some Bollywood in India. We just made these completely preposterous locations our mental home, and it's kind of truer than what really did happen because we can show ourselves doing these things; it's clowning. The main thing that that communicates, besides the plot elements, is that it's not rocket science. Here are these two bumbling guys living in this dilapidated warehouse, supposedly having these ideas, and you can see our thought processes and it's not very complicated.

We filmed for weeks in Absurdland and did all kinds of crazy things. But that's how we decided to tie it together--by creating a comic book version of our thinking because it's very simple thoughts that lead from one to the next. The main thing was to say, OK, we do this thing on the BBC, the stock tanks because of this thing [and] there's this whole system that prevents companies from doing the right thing. So how bad can that get, you know? Oh, global warming, and then the end of the world and these corporations, and then they'll lead us right into the wall gleefully. So everything we filmed after that was about that. The conferences were about how bad things could get and what we could do about it. And then finally there's the end--Let's change things, with the New York Times action. So the plot is really simple; we just had to plug in these things to make it work.

D: How many different Absurdland scenarios did you come up with?

AB: Dozens. All kinds of stuff. We're actually going to make a whole separate movie just from those. We'll work on that later. We're working on distribution and outreach for the film right now. We decided we would do it ourselves because we weren't so happy with the way United Artists distributed The Yes Men. They had a lot of muscle and they had a lot of money, but they didn't really listen to us and they ended up doing some really dorky promotion that didn't help the movie. So we decided, Well, we just spent five years making this thing; we should also distribute it.

D: How are you distributing it?

AB: We've teamed up with really smart people like Shadow Distribution, which did The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and some other great films. They're really dedicated and they work hard. And we've got a publicist here [in the Bay Area], Karen Larsen. In New York, we've got a run at the Film Forum in October. We got a big outreach grant from FACT. Juliette Timsit saw the film and saw the potential for activist involvement in it. So we've got an outreach coordinator. We're talking to activist groups around the country to make it effective for them and get people to theaters and somehow have those audiences be motivated to join up with these activist groups.

D: So that's your goal: to try to get audiences be active themselves?

AB: Yeah, that's the whole purpose of the film, really. And of course that's the purpose of all activist groups--to get people involved with what they're doing locally. There are reasons to be active everywhere in the country, everywhere in the world. And there are a lot of groups working on those issues. All they need is more people. We hope that people will go see the film because it's funny, and will then join a group afterwards when they're motivated to do something.

Chuleenan Svetvilas is a writer and editor based in Oakland, California.

In January 2008, I spent 13 days in Phnom Penh working on a documentary film about Cambodia 30 years after the fall of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. Many Cambodians were talking about the upcoming international tribunal, in which five former Khmer Rouge leaders (Pol Pot, never put on trial, died in 1998.) face charges of crimes against humanity for their part the deaths of 1.7 million of their people. A former soldier named Nhem En had been called as one of the witnesses. Sixteen at the time, he was a staff photographer at Tuol Sleng Prison, also known as S-21, where he dutifully photographed 6,000 prisoners before they were tortured and killed. 

It was a difficult production in nearly every way, and I vented my frustration in e-mail reports to Sara Bernstein, the film's supervising producer at HBO Documentary Films.      

The film, The Conscience of Nhem En, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary and was broadcast on HBO in July 2009. The DVD is available November 2 through Farallon Films.

DAY 1

Dear Sara:

First day in Phnom Penh. I drop my luggage at the hotel and go directly to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where most of the film will be shot. I'm unprepared for the experience. It's not just a museum, but the site where thousands of people were tortured and killed. One is forced to consider the worst that humans can do to one another--cruelty beyond comprehension. 

In tiny, two-by-six-foot cells, the prisoners were chained to the floor. They pissed into coolant containers and shit into ammunition boxes. If you spilled a drop, the guards pushed your face to the ground and made you lick it up.

Photographs of the prisoners are on display throughout--startling images of men, women, children, the elderly, even infants, before they were tortured and killed. Most of them stare at the camera, shocked and bewildered. For me, the most disturbing images are of the people who seem unaware of what is about to happen--and reflexively smile for the camera. 

Six thousand of the photos were shot by the subject of our film, Nhem En.     

Later, we visit the Choeung Ek killing fields outside the city. 

On the edge of the field, there is a huge, beautiful oak tree, which was used to bash babies' heads in. Women were striped, gang-raped, killed and thrown into mass graves.

Our interpreter, Han Ong, tells me about a woman he met who escaped the killing fields. Her Khmer Rouge guard told her he wouldn't rape her, but told her to say he did. A group of soldiers came along, asked him if he had raped her and he said, "Yes." They said, "Okay, it's our turn," and started to pull down their pants. A voice yelled out that a pregnant woman was escaping, and the soldiers rushed off. The sympathetic guard told the woman to run. She slipped into the water and hid for several hours.

The associate producer, Singeli Agnew, goes off with the camera to shoot some b-roll, and I hang out with Han. He was 7 years old during the time of the Khmer Rouge. He points to a palm tree and tells me he survived because of his ability to climb the trees and collect the sugar from the palm flower. He smiles and notes that palm sugar tastes better than any other kind of sugar. We talk about his family and his reunion with his mother after the war. It takes him a moment to realize tears are running down his cheeks. He says, "I'm sorry," then turns away and disappears for a half-hour.

I watch people, mostly tourists from China, Japan and Europe. They take off their shoes and walk the four or five steps up to the shrine where hundreds of human skulls are kept. As they slip their shoes back on and depart, they look stunned. A 20-year-old Cambodian woman prays nearby. She looks up, notices me staring at her and glares back. I realize I've intruded, and I respectfully nod to her. Her expression softens to a smile. Later, walking and driving around the city, I notice the same defiance on many people's faces.

DAY 3

The pre-production work has been frustrating. People who have a lot to say suddenly know nothing when we ask about filming them. Both the government and non-governmental organizations that have offered their assistance seem more interested in keeping an eye on us than helping us. Getting the necessary permissions has been a wild goose chase. We've been sent all over the city, back and forth to the same places, chasing the Minister of Information, the Minister of Culture, the Deputy Minister of Culture, his Excellency somebody, his Supreme Excellency somebody else. I'm not sure if we're not getting results because we were not giving them an envelope with cash or they really don't want to help us.

Corruption and bribery are a way of life. On the street, you see gangsters openly making collections, which the people call "taxes."

DAY 4

We film an interview with a tough, four-and-a-half-foot tall man named Bou Meng, one of four known survivors of Tuol Sleng Prison. He survived because he was an artist. A Khmer Rouge guard came around and asked, "Can anyone paint?" Bou Meng eagerly announced, "I can." So they stopped his torture, which had been going on for 30 days, and handed him a pencil and piece of paper. The guard shouted, "Draw something! If it's no good, we'll kill you." Luckily, they liked the drawing and ordered him to paint a portrait of Pol Pot, the notorious leader of the Khmer Rouge. Again, he was warned, "If it's no good, we'll kill you."

At the end of the day, we walk through a Phnom Penh ghetto. There's poverty like I've never seen--naked children, amputees, a thin man with AIDS lying on a mat, whole families living in an area as big as a full-sized bed with cement or dirt floors and no electricity, just fire. Of course, my camera draws a lot of attention, so I can't film people going through their daily routines.

Instead, I film portraits of several people, asking them to stare directly at the lens, like the S-21 prison photos but considerably more cheerful. To thank them, I ask Han to buy corn on the cob for about 20 street kids. At first, he seems to disapprove, saying, "You don't need to give them anything. They're peasants." But he gets into it when the children start laughing, and he buys skewered fish for them as well.

It's miserable here, but also alive. Crowds of people everywhere--on the street, in cars, on motorcycles and bikes. Everywhere, all day long, it feels like a street fair.

Tonight, we meet Nhem En, the photographer of Tuol Sleng, and a dedicated Khmer Rouge soldier. I was told he wants to be famous and scam money from his experience. Others are less critical. Vann Nath, another survivor of Tuol Sleng, told me, "I met Nhem En. I don't blame him."  

We'll film him at the S-21 prison tomorrow. Later this week, we'll go to his village, a nine-hour trip by car, jeep, motorcycle and foot to a remote jungle area on the Thai border. The area is known as the last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge.

LATER

We had dinner with Nhem En, the photographer. He was happy-go-lucky, kind of childish and a little strange. His reputation seems harsh, but we'll see.

11 AT NIGHT

We have to find a new interpreter before tomorrow morning's interview with Nhem En. Han can't do it anymore. The interviews are bringing back his own painful memories--he lost his father, brothers and sisters--and it's overwhelming him. Today, he went blank in the middle of the interview. He just stopped talking. I don't know if he realized it, but I asked him if he was okay, if he wanted to take a break, and he said, "Yes, I need to stop." After a long break, he was still distracted, so we limited the interpreting to just asking the questions and briefly summarizing the responses. Han is normally super cool, on top of everything, so it was unsettling to watch him go through this.

DAY 6

Dear Sara:

We made it through yesterday. Han was upset about letting us down, so I asked him to continue as the production coordinator and also contribute questions to the interviews. I think he feels relieved. 

We talked with several Cambodian/English interpreters but most were educated abroad and sound like snooty Brits or spoiled American college students. I didn't think they'd be a good match for the people we're interviewing.

We lucked out and found a man named Sok Chamrouen. He mostly works as a tour guide, but he's an excellent interpreter. He's easy-going, but professional and doesn't back away from or soften challenging questions. As it is with nearly everyone we meet, he suffered greatly during the time of the Khmer Rouge, and lost most of his family.

Yesterday, all day at the prison, we interviewed Nhem En. He smiled through my questions about what it was like to witness the last moments of thousands of people's lives. At one point, he bristled and said, "What am I supposed to do? Sit around and cry about the past?" 

He lied. He said he was unaware of torture at the prison, but later admitted he heard people screaming all day long. He said that the guards never touched the female prisoners because they would be punished if they did. But it is well known that they regularly and brutally raped the women. In some of the Nhem En's own photos, the young women's faces are swollen from being punched.

I pressed him hard. His casual tone about the suffering that passed in front of his lens made me hostile. I suppose I wanted him to apologize for his part in the horror. I told him that the photographs he took are cold and cruel, without compassion, and I felt it reflected the photographer. He got angry, threatened to stop the interview, and said we couldn't see any of his personal photos unless we paid him $10,000. I told him we would pay him the same honorarium we paid the other interviewees, about $500 to compensate for their time. Suddenly, he turned jovial again, slapped me on the back, as if to say "just kidding," and called me his friend.

DAY 7

We were set to spend the day in rural areas outside of Phnom Penh filming former Khmer Rouge guards, but our leads turned out to be false.

I'm exhausted. The day starts early, around 6:30, and goes late. 

The production is tense. It appears we're being spied on or, more politely, monitored. When we interviewed Nhem En, there was a man we thought was a bored janitor hanging around. Today, we saw him coming out of DC-Cambodia, the NGO that controls much of the media that flows out of Cambodia.  

More paranoia: Our interview with Nhem En was interrupted by his cell phone four times. According to Sok, one of the calls was from his wife and the three others were from a government minister. He answered, "Yes, Your Excellency," and said, "Don't worry, I'm not telling them anything."

I'm not sleeping well. I think about what I've experienced here and I can't process it. I call home and try to talk about it with Peggy, but the words won't come out of my mouth. Instead, we talk about what's up at home, how Daisy's doing in pre-school. Then I hang up, put my head in my hands and weep. 

DAY 8

Sara: 

On the lighter side:, the food is good--Khmer, Thai, Vietnamese and Chinese dishes with wonderful seasoning, whole leaves and twigs. Last night, we had a fantastic Chinese dinner. Everything on the menu was on display in front of the restaurant, including the vegetables. You pick what you want to eat--live fish, lobster, prawns, crabs, frogs, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, green onions--and tell them how you want it cooked, deep fried or stir-fried.

Han makes sure we don't poison ourselves. He says the rule is, if it grows above ground it's safe, but if it grows in the ground or in water, it must be boiled or fried.

Although the production has been difficult, we are getting good footage. We shot a lot of strong b-roll material and completed four in-depth interviews with the photographer and the three known male survivors of the S-21 prison. 

Today, we interviewed a man named Vann Nath. Like Bou Meng, he survived because he could paint (the third man, Chum Mey, lived because he could fix sewing machines). Vann Nath was tortured with electro-shock, pliers to his hands and nipples, and beatings. His interview was rich in detail, but detached. Before we started, he said, "I will tell you everything, except I will not talk about what happened to my wife, and I will not cry."   

DAY 11

Sorry, I've been out of touch.

We found a female S-21 survivor named Chim Math. There is some controversy as to whether she is a true S-21 survivor. No other women are known to have survived. But I walked through the camp with her, into the torture rooms, and I believe her. She has a full life--a husband and children, works as a social worker in a ghetto outside of the city. She said, if she met her torturers today, she wouldn't hesitate, no matter what the consequences were: She would kill them. It was shocking to hear those words from such a gentle person.

It's been impossible finding a Khmer Rouge soldier who will talk. We met Gung Ni, a former soldier who was mistreated by his comrades because he's an amputee (they often shot the badly wounded). He was not involved with the atrocities but introduced us to his neighbor, who had, on previous occasions, admitted his direct role in several executions. Of course, when we arrived he said, "I'm nobody. I didn't see anything. I didn't do anything."

I like Sok Chamrouen a lot. We hang out together while Singeli and Han do the hard work of making arrangements. He's helped me understand some of the history behind what we heard in the interviews. He explained Cambodia's geographic vulnerability to Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. He told me about the vicious rivalry between the Vietnamese and Cambodians, how both sides used acts of extreme cruelty to intimidate each other. Before one particular story he asked me, "Are you sure you want to hear this?" I said, "Yes," without thinking. Now the story lives inside me. It is too horrible to share with anyone and I fear I'll never get it out of my head.

The news here is full of violent acts, from political assassinations to domestic disputes, many involving hatchets.     

DAY 12

We spent the day filming in the document room at the museum. I worked with Sok Chamrouen, going over the confessions of prisoners of S-21--meticulously recorded documents written in pink or blue high school essay books (S-21 was a former high school). One farmer was tortured until he gave the names of all the men in his village as CIA agents. He probably had no idea what the CIA was.   

DAY 13

This morning, I heard a heartbreaking story on Radio Free Asia. Early in 1975, the Khmer Rouge put out a call to Cambodians around the world to return and be part of the country's bright new future. There were around 5,000 Cambodians living abroad at the time, mostly in France--students, business people, artists and foreign service people. Four thousand responded and boarded specially chartered planes, which flew from Paris to Beijing to Cambodia. It turned out to be a ploy to eliminate any interference from Cambodian expats who might speak out or plot against the Khmer Rouge. When they arrived, they were immediately executed. I imagined a young man, studying at the Sorbonne, excited about returning to help his country, then stepping off the plane and realizing the horrible deception. When the radio story ended, I had trouble speaking for a few minutes.

I'm sitting in the airport, having coffee and a sandwich, waiting to come home. I'm reading a report, "Understanding Trauma in Cambodia," given to me by the Center for Social Development in Cambodia, which estimates that a huge percentage of the population--essentially everybody--suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The report states, "The most evident symptom in Cambodia today is fear." They also studied Cambodians in America and found similarly high rates of depression.   

On the first day here, I wrote about the angry faces of people on the streets of Phnom Penh. I was wrong: It's not anger. It's fear.

In our interview with Chim Math, she talked about returning to her village when the war was over. Everyone was shocked to see her; they thought she had been killed. One of the village women kissed her and said, "Life is precious." I think of that and cling to it.  

Steven Okazaki received his fourth Academy Award nomination for The Conscience of Nhem En. He also won an Oscar for Days of Waiting in 1991 and a Primetime Emmy for White Light/Black Rain in 2008.  

As the Dodgers faced off against the St. Louis Cardinals in the first game of the National League Division Series on TVs above, guests talked about their new projects, news of the day (including Roman Polanski and current Supreme Court discussions), exchanged info and mixed and mingled into the evening.

The crowd included Roadside Attractions co-presidents Howard Cohen and Eric d'Arbeloff (enjoying the success of  The September Issue, with Good Hair coming out this week), Zeus Quijano, Jr. (director/writer of DocuWeeks 2009 participant point of entry), Adam Chapnick (President, of DocWorkers and IDA Board Member), producers and editors with projects in the works, some just getting started, and many IDA staffers and friends. Check out some pics from the night below.

Read about the August, 28, 2009 IDA Mixer here.

See pictures from the July, 15, 2009 IDA Mixer here.

See pictures from all 2008 IDA Mixers here.

While the Depiction of Animal Cruelty Law was specifically aimed at stopping a certain type of sexual fetish videos which involve crushing small animals to death, it has been used against filmmaker Robert Stevens, who produces dogfighting videos.

Stevens became the first person ever prosecuted under a 1999 statute for selling videos such as Japan Pit Fights, Pick a Winna and Catch Dogs and Country Living. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. He didn't stage the fights or even film them. He pieced together films made by others, mainly in Japan, where dogfighting is legal.

A federal appeals court threw out the conviction and struck down the law. The appeals court said it was written so broadly that it could apply to too many other instances that aren't cruel by law, including pictures in hunting magazines, scene in classic Hollywood movies, even documentaries such as The Cove and Food, Inc., that may use certain imagery to illustrate a point.

The IDA filed an Amicus brief, telling the high court why the case being heard is important to the membership of IDA and urging the court to rule in favor of the filmmaker. Attending the hearing for IDA was former President, Michael C. Donaldson.

National Public Radio ran a great wrap-up of the arguments by the judges.

From NPR:

Seeking to revive the animal cruelty law, the government appealed to the Supreme Court. The Obama administration contended that depictions of animal cruelty are not covered by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, just as child pornography is not covered. Defending the statute today, Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal argued that Congress wrote its ban narrowly by creating exemptions from prosecution for depictions that have a serious educational, scientific, or artistic purpose. Chief Justice John Roberts bore in on those exemptions as evidence that prosecutions would depend on the views of the speaker.

As we await the judgment, audio and text transcript of piece detailing the arguments can be found here.

Regina Kimbell filed the $5 million copyright infringement lawsuit in United States District Court, Central District of California, alleging that Rock's film is a little too similar to her doc My Nappy Roots: A Journey Through Black Hair-itage which she claims she screened for Rock in on the set of his TV show Everyone Hates Chris two years ago.

Rock’s representative had no comment.

Good Hair opens in select theaters this Friday and wide on Oct. 13.

Read a Documentary magazine interview with Rock about his new film right here.

Plus, get the latest updates about the movie (but probably not the lawsuit) on the movie's website.