2015 Fellow Emma Mankey-Hidem recently attended several film festivals as part of planning for the life of her own film BLUE RIDGE BARNUM. "The biggest benefit, especially for anyone who will eventually be submitting their own film to festivals, is just to get a sense of what different festivals are looking for."

Minnesota-based filmmaker Jan Selby from Quiet Island Films recently visited Docs In Progress while she was in town for the Washington DC premiere of her latest film BEYOND THE DIVIDE. While she was in town, she talked to a group of filmmakers about her real-world experiences with crowdsourcing theatrical distribution through the platforms TUGG and GATHR.

How did a blog post evolve into a full-fledged documentary film? 2015 Fellow Day Al-Mohammed reflects on how a passion for history and for disability rights led her to the story of the Civil War's "Invalid Corps."

From time to time, we welcome Docs In Progress community members to share their thoughts on films out in the doc-o-sphere.  Beth Kelly recently checked out a Chinese environmental documentary which may less well known in the usual doc fest circuit, but has been making waves via social media around the world.

by Matthew Radcliff, Co-Organizer, WIFV/Docs In Progress Documentary Roundtable

Every other month, the WIFV/Docs In Progress Documentary Roundtable welcomes filmmakers and industry experts to discuss topics of interest to the documentary filmmaking community. On February 9, 2015, we welcomed three speakers to talk about how documentary filmmakers can navigate the world of public television. The speakers were Kathryn Washington (CPB), Robyn DeShields (DeShields Associates), and Ramona Diaz (independent filmmaker). The following are notes I made from the presentation.

K

Nominations for the 2015 Academy Awards will be announced on January 15. But the race for Best Feature Documentary has been on for a while since the Academy announced the 15 films which had been shortlisted from 134 which had been submitted. While many expect the final race to come down to a competition between Life Itself and Citizenfour, we asked some members of the Docs In Progress community what they wish had made the shortlist. Feel free to weigh in in the comments below.

by Guest Contributor Josh Glick, Yale University

The 10-part Showtime documentary series, The Untold History of the United States (2012), and the theatrically released documentary feature, Citizenfour (2014), are interesting for the ways they give shape to recent and more distant events and for how they push conventional boundaries of collaboration.

by John Filson

Are you a new filmmaker, or aspiring to be? Do you feel a tug on your heart to make positive change in the world, and want to use the power of film? This note is for you.

It can take a long time to call yourself a “filmmaker” in front of other people. I’m still in the denial stage, and quite comfortable there. My interest in making documentaries stems from the way well-made films have always gripped me like a vice and lit a fire in my belly that made me feel unstoppable. That collection of emotional imprints over the years is surely a big reason I aspired to make social change my profession. 

By Guest Contributor Josh Glick, Assistant Professor of English and Film at Hendrix College, Mellon Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University in the Integrated Humanities

Watching Life Itself  (2014) in Washington D.C.’s E Street Cinema, I felt director Steve James’s recent portrait of the late Roger Ebert strike a personal chord. As a wide-eyed teenager attending a summer program at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in 2001, I was fortunate to be exposed to the writing of Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and Manny Farber as part of a broader menu of cultural criticism. Reading film reviews helped me to cultivate an appetite for all kinds of movies. Now, as it’s my job to teach others a critical awareness of how moving images shape and are shaped by the world around us, I have come to appreciate how it is often the written word that coaxes even the most reluctant spectators to become eager viewers.

Throughout the year, we’ll be featuring each of our Fellows as guest bloggers where they will share their thoughts on their films, filmmaking, or anything they think would be of interest to the documentary community. This month we hear from Amy Oden about her latest documentary project which offers a different take on commercial sex work within the context of globalization.

“Don’t start thinking that you’re better than someone else, just because you have a different job than they do,” I said to one of the interns at my day job last week.  You could file the comment under “unsolicited life advice,” but it very much resonates with and originates from my experiences filming workers in the commercial sex industry in the Pacific Rim.