Docs In Progress is celebrating its 10th anniversary on Tuesday, May 20 with Decade of Docs, a special evening for the Washington DC area's filmmaking community. This event will honor the past 10 years of Docs In Progress and the filmmakers we have helped to nurture while also looking forward to the future.  Ten years and more than 1000 filmmakers later, Docs In Progress is honoring the achievements of its community with a series of awards for alumni of its film programs, as well as a special award for Sky Sitney for her contributions to the Washington DC documentary film community during her eight years with the Silverdocs/AFI Docs Film Festival. Sitney will also join filmmaker Doug Block (51 Birch Street, 112 Weddings, The D-Word), Documentary Center Director Nina Seavey, and StoryCodeDC's Felicia Pride for a special panel discussion on the future of documentary film and filmmaking. 

We are less than a month away from Silverdocs (or more properly AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival) when the documentary world converges on downtown Silver Spring. It€™s still one of our favorite documentary festivals and it€™s not just because it is only a stone€™s throw away from Docs In Progress. / Israel/Palestinian Territories/USA, 2009, 81 minutes (Director: Julia Bacha)-This rousing film about one Palestinian village and its unlikely hero-humble family man turned activist Ayed Morrar-reveals the power of ordinary people to peaceably fight for extraordinary change.

The next installment of our guest blog series in which we ask Docs In Progress staff and alumni to reflect on how they they spent their summers in documentary land... 

Next up, Andre Dahlman whose film MURPHY'S GAMBIT: A CHESS HUSTLER'S STORY was featured in the Docs In Progress 2008 Trailer Night.  Andre has also taken several classes with Docs In Progress and was one of three Docs In Progress Fellows to the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar.   While Andre gained a lot from the challenging discussions at Flaherty, he was up for another challenge this summer.