Wow!  Thanks to more than 200 of you, Docs In Progress raised more than $17,000 in our Winter and Summer Fundraising campaigns.

Documentary Appreciation Salon Wrap-Up and Reflections “Mockumentary v. Documentary”

by Erica Ginsberg, Docs In Progress Executive Director

Can you believe this is the 10th anniversary of Silverdocs?   We may think of this as our neighborhood film festival, since the main venues are only a few blocks away from Docs In Progress.  But, in reality, Silverdocs is one of the top all-documentary film festivals in the world.  And that's what we love about it - the global and the local come together.

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Docs In Progress welcomes guest bloggers from time to time who  provide perspectives on different aspects of documentary filmmaking.  Today we are pleased to feature Andrew Zinnes, co-author of the The Documentary Film Makers Handbook and producer of The Documentary Summit, a traveling two day professional conference for documentary filmmakers which will be coming to Washington DC on March 10-11.  Since one of the topics which will be discussed at the summit will be the balance between technical values and storytelling, we asked Andrew to offer his two cents on the matter.

Fiscal sponsorship is something that many documentary filmmakers seek out so they can raise grant funds which are only given to nonprofits and are able to accept contributions from donors who want a tax deduction. How to decide on the right fiscal sponsor? So much of the emphasis has been on what fiscal sponsors are looking for in fiscal sponsorees and yet fiscal sponsorees also should explore all their options to find a fiscal sponsor who is a good fit for their project.  Too many filmmakers focus only on which fiscal sponsor takes the lowest admin fee and not enough on all the other factors which can make or break a successful fiscal sponsorship relationship. After giving talks at the Foundation Center on Fiscal Sponsorship in the Arts, our Executive Director Erica Ginsberg adapted her presentation into this list of considerations.

Every summer, Docs In Progress gives an opportunity for our summer intern to write an article of interest to the Docs In Progress community.  This year, Fay Gartenberg examined the question of how one can best educate themselves in documentary filmmaking. 

The Silverdocs Film Festival and Conference is in full swing.  We’ll be filing some reviews next week, but just wanted to share a few impressions as it happens.  Contributor Matthew Radcliff attended an intriguing conference session on Tuesday - a DSLR workshop led by documentary filmmaker Steven Bognar and DP/Editor Matt Gottshalk from Alexandria-based McGee Digital Media.  Gottshalk is a noted expert on using DSLR cameras for video work and is a co-author of From Still to Motion.

“I spent all my money making my film and have no money left for festivals. Will you please waive my submission fee?”

This is the start of many an e-mail film festival programmers seem to receive while their festival’s submission period is open. While it is likely a true statement in most cases, the question is why? Why are filmmakers not budgeting for outreach as a part of their planning? It is a bit like budgeting to get you through a pregnancy and not saving any money to help feed, clothe, or save for a child’s education.

by Erica Ginsberg

Docs In Progress is gearing up for our seventh year of presenting work-in-progress screening programs. When Adele Schmidt and I started this (ad)venture back in May 2004, our only goal was to help fellow documentary filmmakers have a space to share their works in progress with peers in a public setting. At the time, we could not imagine how Docs In Progress would evolve. In the first year, we relied on word-of-mouth among the DC-area filmmaking community to garner submissions. To this day, I am still amazed at the filmmakers who put their trust in us to present and moderate feedback sessions on their works-in-progress....especially in those first few screenings where we faced technical challenges and an uncertainity if anyone would show up for the screenings.

Perhaps this topic is particularly on my mind because I have recently returned from a trip through Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi where I had a chance to see some of the places which formed some of the most powerful images of the civil rights movement - Little Rock Central High School, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and the Lyceum at Ole Miss. Until the moment I saw those places firsthand, I could only imagine them through written descriptions of what happened there and from the still and moving images of what happened at each of them more than half a century ago. Iconic images which tell a story so much more deeply than the written texts or even on-camera interviews which accompany them. They help connect me to a world before I was born, a world it is sometimes hard to believe existed if not for these images as everlasting evidence.