Ovation TV has acquired an hour-long documentary special Heath Ledger: A Tribute to air on the cable channel in August. The story about the late Oscar-winning actor will air as part of a week-long programming event called Live Fast, Die Young, which will also present specials on Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe and more. (via The Hollywood Reporter)
Spanish broadcast network V-me will premiere Ricky Martin's documentary on human trafficking on July 10. Vivir en Libertad: Lucha Contra la Trata de Personas is a 30-minute documentary, co-produced between the Inter-American Development Bank and the Ricky Martin Foundation. The doc was made as part of the Call and Live! project, the first anti-trafficking regional campaign in the Americas. For more information go to www.rickymartinfoundation.org.
KCET, the Friends of the Los Angeles River and students from the Los Angeles Leadership Academy have created an amazing website of video and audio portraits of the Los Angeles River. The site allows users to experience the 52-mile stretch land and meet those who are helping it flow back into our public life and popular imagination. (via KCET)
The 10th anniversary of the Maui Film Festival, which runs June 17-21 in Kahului, Hawaii, will open with foreign-language Oscar winner Departures and Dana Brown's documentary Highwater. The fest will also honor Willie Nelson with its Maverick Award. The award will be presented June 19 at the world premiere of Turk Pipkin's documentary One Piece at a Time, a film about solutions to global problems, with music from Ben Harper and Jack Johnson and appearances by Nelson, among others. (via The Hollywood Reporter)
Plus, don't forget to pick up your tickets for our next installment of our 2009 Doc U Seminar Series: An Evening with Ross Kauffman, the Academy Award-winning director behind Born into Brothels, taking place on June 11 at the Kodak Screening Room in Hollywood, CA. Get tickets and information here.
Kassim The Dream, the IDA Award-nominated documentary from Kief Davidson, opens today in New York. The film tells the story of world champion boxer Kassim "The Dream" Ouman--born in Uganda, kidnapped by the rebel army and trained to be a child soldier at the age of 6. When the rebels took over the government, Kassim became an army soldier who was forced to commit many horrific atrocities, making him both a victim and perpetrator. He soon discovered the army's boxing team and realized the sport was his ticket to freedom. After 12 years of warfare, Kassim defected from Africa and arrived in the United States. Homeless and culture-shocked, he quickly rose through the boxing ranks and became World Junior Middleweight Champion.
For an interview with Davidson held in conjunction with the IDA Award nomination, click here.
Despite the best efforts by the documentary community to save it, the Documentary Institute at the University of Florida was recently eliminated. The institute had generated a petition in April that generated over 1,100 signatures, but neither that achievement nor a second consecutive Student Emmy Award was enough to sway the guardians of the ivory tower. According to Gainesville.com, the University of Florida itself recently announced a total of over $30 million in budget cuts and 58 layoffs for the coming academic year.
"As you probably know, Florida has had its share of budget problems--including severe cuts to higher education," says Churchill Roberts, co-director of the institute, which operated out of the university's College of Journalism and Education. "We had the misfortune of having a new dean [Dr. John W. Wright] who didn't value documentary and decided it wasn't central to the mission of the college. He was quoted as saying it was too expensive."
Dean Wright had cut the institute's $200,000 in 2008, which, according to Churchill, had paid for "assistantships, documentary thesis projects, travel, equipment, and seed money for faculty projects." The institute survived the next year on grants and gifts, as well as royalties from the sale of its films, which include Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power, Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore, Giving Up the Canal, Campaign for Cuba and Last Days of the Revolution.
But no sooner had the axe fallen when three universities expressed interest in taking over the program, and one, which will be announced officially at a later date, went a step further and offered positions to Roberts' colleagues, Sandra Dickson, Cynthia Hill and Cara Pilson. The Documentary Institute will officially move to that soon-to-be-disclosed university in 2010.
As for Roberts,."I'll remain here to administer our grants. We just received an NEA grant which doesn't become effective until July 1 and we have a $200,000 pledge from the Jerome A. Yavitz Charitable Foundation, which is being paid over time."
The exodus involves at least 20 staffers and is from the top down, including Festival Director Britta Erickson and Artistic Director Brit Withey and co-founder Ron Henderson.
"A dramatic mass exodus is underway at the Denver Film Society, organizer of the three decade old Denver International Film Festival. Longtime veterans of the organization, including Festival Director Britta Erickson and Artistic Director Brit Withey, as well as esteemed co-founder Ron Henderson, have resigned in Denver. And now they are being followed out the door by some seventeen other people at the Film Society and the festival. The move marks a striking mutiny currently taking place at the leading Colorado film institution."
AJ Schnack offers insight to the situation, backing up the theory that the departures are the result of tension under the leadership of new DFS executive director Burleigh “Bo” Smith. He writes:
"There has been unease over the leadership of Smith since late last year, particularly in an organization as tightly bound as the DFS had been throughout Henderson's leadership and in his passing the torch to Withey and Erickson in 2007."
Developing...
Read the entire indieWIRE article (and see a list of people leaving the Denver festival and Film Society) here.
Read AJ Schnack entire piece here.
On May 14 director and political activist Robert Greenwald became the star of our latest 2009 Doc U Seminar Series event, when the IDA and Greenwald's Brave New Studios hosted An Evening with Robert Greenwald. During the sold out event, Greenwald discussed how he fell in love with making documentaries, how people first discovered his film Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers, how the Internet and sites like YouTube are expanding his reach, and more.
The video of highlights is available on our site. It has also been posted on the IDA's YouTube channel.
Plus, don't forget to pick up your tickets for our next installment of our 2009 Doc U Seminar Series: An Evening with Ross Kauffman, the Academy Award-winning director behind Born into Brothels, taking place on June 11 at the Kodak Screening Room in Hollywood, CA. Get tickets and information here.
Then, we couldn't wait to hear what GM executives had to say about it.
But we really couldn't wait to hear what Michael Moore had to say about it.
The Academy Award-winning filmmaker and author who directed and produced Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko took to his own blog with a piece called "Goodbye, GM":
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.
More continued to lay out nine suggestions for the GM reorganization, which included a gas tax, bullet trains and light rail mass transit. Sounds out of this world? Not really. He ended with this comment:
Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.
So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.
Read the entire piece--and other updates--at www.michaelmoore.com.
Some absorbing and compelling reads floatin' around the blogosphere this past week. Here are a few pieces to kick-start your Monday.
David Poland has an interesting post last week over at The Hot Blog on what he calls "Doc Layering:"
...the explosion in films being made, thanks to cheaper production opportunities – though a film like The Cove can cost over $2.5 million to produce and bring to market (Roadside/Lionsgate) – is leading to film being more and more like books, in that you read many to gather insight, taking valuable information from each one, synthesizing the ideas into some sort of personal coherence. None is definitive. In fact, in this era, being definitive may be something left only to long view historians like Ken Burns. 100… 200 years later, the history tends to have rolled out and then someone can come along and try to be comprehensive.
In the piece, he talks specifically about the group of environmental documentaries he saw while up at the Seattle International Film Festival. I had a similar "Layering" experience this year at Sundance. Each eco-doc that I saw gave me a different part of the story about our planet's health, whether it was because of the information presented or the manner in which the filmmaker chose to communicate his or her information.
Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard focus on Werner Herzog in this month's "The Conversations", a monthly feature on The House Next Door Blog in which the two go in-depth on a variety of cinematic subjects. In this month's installment, they use the book Herzog on Herzog (Ed. Paul Cronin) as a jumping off point to talk about everthing from the idiosyncratic director's relationships with his subjects to the autobiographical nature of his films.
Ted Hope has posted his provocative May 28th address to the New York Foundation for the Arts over on his blog Truly Free Film. Here's a tidbit from the speech, entitled "Towards the New Model: Filmmaking as an Ongoing Conversation With Your Audience", to whet your appetite:
The discussion/rant was a bit of a mash up of my positive and negative lists, both the hope for the future and the fear of the present as we live it in Indieville It is commonly understand that change only comes when the pain of the present outweighs the fear of the future. I would like to have some change -- so be warned, I may have slanted it a bit in hopes of that change.
Thomas Allen Harris has spent much of his filmmaking career employing his personal family photo archives in his documentaries as a means to look at larger themes such as identity and religion (That's My Face/é Minha Cara), gay and lesbian issues (Vintage--Families of Value) and apartheid (The Twelve Disciples Of Nelson Mandela). His latest project, the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR), aims to use the power of interactive media to create a movement to get African-Americans to reconsider and revalue their family photo collections.
The DDFR project centers around a multimedia portal with an interactive mapping interface that showcases African Diasporic photography across time, place and genre. Users will be able to upload photos, video, audio and text to document and share their family stories. Online tools such as blogs, webinars and social networks will drive users to the site, complemented by on-the-ground activities. The portal aims to be a comprehensive repository for images and media of people of African descent over the last 160 years.
The inspiration for DDFR came to Harris after he attended a "When Content Meets Intent" workshop run by Judith Helfand and Robert West's Working Films for the Media Arts Fellows at Renew Media (now the Tribeca Film Institute), and participated in the National Black Programming Consortium's (NBPC) New Media Institute in 2008. "I began thinking about ways to create a multimedia project that would do for the everyday person what I do with my films," Harris explains. He continued to develop the concept at The Producers Institute for New Media Technologies at the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC).
According to Harris, very few institutions collected photos of African-Americans prior to 1960; therefore there is a serious lack of public images of people of African descent. The limited prints that have made it into the public eye tend to reinforce stereotypes, as opposed to providing a visual sampling of the diversity of the African-American experience.
"Where do you find earlier images of and by African-American photographers?" asks Harris. "I imagined they were in people's archives. I thought, I have this treasure trove [of pictures] in my family, others must have a treasure trove in their families."
One of the ways that Harris plans to find his way to these photographic pots of gold is through an innovative outreach program that uses a touring Antiques Roadshow model. With Harris as a host, the DDFR team will go into communities and bring people together at events to publicly share their photographs, videos and stories. Their media will be digitized on-site and uploaded, and the "DDFR Roadshow" itself will be filmed, thus creating more content for the site.
Harris and his team tested out the DDFR Roadshow in Atlanta this past February at the Integrated Media Association's (IMA) Public Media Conference. Harris projected scans of the photographs that people had brought to the event, and audience members reacted with their own insights and observations. He also showed clips from his latest film, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People. The film explores how African-American communities have used the medium of photography to construct political, aesthetic and cultural representations of themselves and their world.
IMA Executive Director Mark Fuerst asked Harris to try out the pilot program for the DDFR Roadshow at the IMA Conference because of Harris' solid plans for combining old and new media, and the potential that DDFR has for emotional impact. "There's so much talk about what Obama did with social media, but not as much careful analysis about how much emotion everyone felt about electing the first Black President," says Fuerst. "Obama's team was very skillful, but their success wasn't a matter of technique: the emotion supported the social media. Bringing that back to Thomas, he is tapping into a powerful vein of family and social history. That emotion may give him the fuel he needs to drive this process."
For Harris, the experience in Atlanta was both satisfying and surprising. One of the most gratifying moments in Atlanta occurred when a man came in with photos of his grandfather in military dress. The uniform had insignias on it, but the man wasn't sure what they stood for. There happened to be an audience member who had had a military career and knew that the symbols meant the grandfather was part of the African-American brigade.
"The audience had the information--not one of our experts," Harris notes. "I realized that this kind of event and project truly creates an extended family. I think that is what's going to happen on the Web."
Harris is currently seeking funding to continue development of the portal, and hopes to launch later this summer. DDFR Roadshow events are currently planned for HotDocs in May and SilverDocs in June.
For more on the Digital Diapospora Family Reunion, click here. For a February 23, 2011 New York Times article about the project, click here.
Tamara Krinsky is associate editor of Documentary.
Valentino: The Last Emperor, Matt Tyrnauer's doc about the world-renowned fashion designer, has topped the $1 million mark in box office grosses, making it the third 2009 documentary to achieve that status, following Waltz with Bashir and Earth. As Peter Knecht writes in indieWIRE, Valentino found its audience through a combination of word-of-mouth and a hands-on approach on Tyrnauer and distributor Truly Indie's part to reaching a cross-section of core audiences. Two and a half months after its March 18th release, Valentino is showing no signs of tapering off, with a nationwide expansion to dozens of markets planned for the coming weeks.
This success story recalls that of Rivers and Tides, Thomas Riedelsheimer's 2002 film about artist Andy Goldsworthy that opened at San Francisco's Roxie Cinema and played in theaters for over a year, earning over $2 million. And in 2007, Into Great Silence, Philip Groning's three-hour observational film about Carthusian monks at work and in prayer, played in theaters for over six months, earning longtime player Zeitgeist Films a solid $790,452. The right combination of strategy, patience, endurance, zeal and luck just might yield the kind of gratifying results that these films experienced.
Here's a rundown of the top ten grossing docs of the year, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com:
1) Earth: $31,112,280
2) Waltz with Bashir: $ 2,283,849
3) Valentino: The Last Emperor: $ 1,193,635
4) Every Little Step: $ 915,028
5) The Cross: The Arthur Blessit Story: $ 741,557
6) Tyson: $ 684,799
7) Enlighten Up!: $ 175,782
8) Outrage: $ 161,510
9) Brothers at War: $ 152,798
10) Examined Life: $ 114,481
American University's Center for Social Media, in collaboration with Washington College of Law's Program
on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and the Stanford University Law School Fair Use Project, recently launched a new video explaining how online video creators can make remixes, mashups, and other common online video genres with the knowledge that they are staying within copyright law.
The video, titled Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend, is a companion piece to the
Center's Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, released last summer under the leadership of American University professors Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi.
"This video lets people know about the code, an essential creative tool, in the natural language of online video." said Aufderheide, in a statement. "The code protects this emerging zone from censorship and self-censorship. Creators, online video providers and copyright holders will be able to know when copying is stealing and when it's legal."
Like the code, the video identifies six kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. They are:
- Commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material
- Use for illustration or example
- Incidental or accidental capture of copyrighted material
- Memorializing or rescuing of an experience or event
- Use to launch a discussion
- Recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements depend on relationships between existing works
For instance, a blogger's critique of mainstream news is commentary. The fat cat sitting on the couch watching television is an example of incidental capture of copyrighted material. Many variations on the popular online video "Dramatic Chipmunk" may be considered fair use, because they recombine existing work to create new meaning.
"The fair use doctrine is every bit as relevant in the digital domain as it has been for almost two centuries in the print environment," said Jaszi, founder of AU's Program for Information, Justice, and Intellectual Property and a Professor of Law in AU's Washington College of Law. "Here we see again the strong connection between the fair use principle in copyright and the guarantee of freedom of speech in the Constitution."
RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a film from Brett Gaylor, has been causing quite a stir about the limits of the fair use frontier since the doc's debut in Montreal last summer. An article in the Spring 09 Documentary looks at the Manifesto and includes insights from Aufderheide as to its premise.