Haaretz reports:

Israel declared over the weekend that it is cutting off ties with the BBC to protest a repeat broadcast on non-conventional weapons said to be in Israel.

The program was broadcast for the first time in March in Britain, and was rerun Saturday on a BBC channel that is aired all over the world.

The boycott decision was made by Israel’s public relations forum, made up of representatives from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Foreign Ministry and the Government Press Office.

It was decided that government offices won’t assist BBC producers and reporters, that Israeli officials will not give interviews to the British network, and that the Government Press Office will make it difficult for BBC employees to get press cards and work visas in Israel.

The Third Coast International Audio Festival’s deadline is fast approaching, get your radio documentaries in before July 18th. For more information, go here. Their top prize is $6000, a whole lot cash prize for a radio documentary festival prize.

Entries can be anywhere from 2 — 60 minutes long, must have been produced and presented publicly for the first time on the radio, the Internet or in a gallery/museum setting between August 2001 and May, 2003, and must be produced in English.

Congratulations goes to Cherry Arnold who recently recieved a $5,000 scripting grant from the Rhode Island Council on the Humanities for her documentary project Buddy. Buddy is a documentary about the life and times of “Buddy” Cianci, the controversial mayor of Providence, Rhode Island.

Wenjie Qin’s To The Land of Bliss was recently selected for the 17th Parnu International Film Festival occuring July 6 — 13th, 2003. For more information about the festival, check here.

The National Teacher Training Institute reviews how video can be used in the classroom as an educational tool.

Richard Wolfson of The Financial Times reports on Arthur Howes documentary Benjamin And His Brother:

Sometimes art does make a difference. The films made by Arthur Howes in the Sudan over the past decade have had a global impact. This is especially true of the second in the series, the devastating Nuba Conversations (2000), a film that charts the wholesale destruction and dispersal of the Nuba culture and people.

The Nuba have been trapped in the middle of a vicious civil war between the Arab Muslim fundamentalist government in the north, and the mainly Christian and black opposition in the south. “I managed to arrange a screening of Nuba Conversations in Nairobi a few years ago at the residence of the Swiss ambassador,” Howes tells me. “All the other ambassadors were invited, the high society in Nairobi, and all the key players in the Sudan conflict. Of course it was followed by a cocktail party!”

The film is indeed tough. We encounter a soldier who has been forced by economic circumstances to fight for the government for a cause he despises, a man who has been tortured by having his hands ironed, and Nuba women roaming the war zone in the mountains, scraping a bare existence. In a visually stunning film we witness a surreal procession of government troops, including Nuba children taken from their homes, conscripted and indoctrinated.

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Andrew Beach writes about keeping online video logs:

Video logs shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement to words, pictures or audio-only postings – they should be another tool available to the author. Unlike television or print publications, the Internet will allow our multimedia commentary to live side by side with text. Each will be able to take turns supporting the views expressed in the other medium. Furthermore, video need not be held to just a commentary situation; the portability of most consumer-level video camera technology means that anyone wanting to can express themselves in documentary or narrative style film on a daily basis and post for viewer consumption.

Documentary video would benefit greatly from blogging, because blogs help promote your ideas, you can communicated directly with your audience, illicit feedback, and work collaboratively to develop a documentary that is based on that feedback – “free” focus-group testing. I quote free, because bandwidth costs for serving video, even post-it-note sized video clips is still relatively expensive, but the price should move toward the free soon.

Current economics aside, a documentary filmmaker could post edits and, based on feedback of those edits, adjust the documentary according to an audiences needs. Then again, no one has to produce what an audience wants, but there is the simplistic and sage addage, “Your customer is always right.”

Jon Udell, technology writer for InfoWorld, is testing similar waters for print journalism who also attributes Dan Gillmor, another tech writer, who says, “This is my guiding principle in journalism. My readers know more than I do, and that’s great!”

Keep The River On Your Right’s brother and sister filmmakers David and Laurie Shapiro are interviewed by Rich Rosell of Digitally Obsessed:

DO: Keep The River On Your Right was a joint project between you two. How did you individually decide to become documentarians?

DS: We were looking to make a film together. We were actually looking to work on a feature film together, and we came to this story (Keep The River On Your Right), which is a whole other story in itself. We found the book in the street, among a box of lost books, and we decided that this was an incredible story. We didn’t think he was alive, or we didn’t think the book was still in print, but with a little bit of detective work we decided where else could he possible live but New York. We looked him up in the phone book. When we met him, he was so not who we thought he was going to be. We pictured a much more machismo guy; we didn’t even pick up the fact that he was gay, at first, until we met. We realized that this guy has an amazing, amazing story, and we realized that it would make a fantastic documentary.

Tonight, in the US, on PBS, POV is premiering the documentary Georgie Girl:

Georgina Beyer, neé George Bertrand, is very likely the first transsexual in the world elected to a national office. Even more astounding is that she was sent to the New Zealand Parliament by a mostly white, rural, conservative constituency that was perfectly aware of her background. It’s a circumstance that says something about the disenchantment of New Zealand’s voters with politics-as-usual, and a lot about the irrepressible politician whom everyone calls “Georgina.”

More information here.

Stoked: The Rise And Fall of Gator is a documentary about a famous skateboarder who went bad, bad enough to serve 30 years in jail.

Wim Wenders discusses himself as a documentarian in SMH:

“As a photographer, you have to be a walker because it’s the only way to actually find places and actually be there,” he says. “Every now and then you have to get into a car, of course, especially in Australia. Otherwise, you wouldn’t get anywhere. Sometimes you have to be in a car for days before you actually get to a place. But then you have to take your camera and walk.”

Some of Wenders’s photographs show the vastness of the Australian outback. It seems he is attracted to epic landscapes as well as streetscapes featuring what he calls the traces of human life.

“I’m attracted by places that I realise are not going to exist very much longer and are about to disappear,” he says. “Or sometimes, just on the contrary, places make you realise that you are about to disappear as a photographer. They have been around for millions of years and they’ll be around in another million years. Nobody is going to remember the human race any more, probably, in a million years. And these places will still be the same.”

Barry Gewen of The New York Times writes about Annette Insdorf’s study, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust:

…simply listing these new films raises a troubling question: Are too many Holocaust documentaries now being made? Has supply outstripped demand? It’s a question that makes people uncomfortable. Who would want to appear callous in the face of such suffering, or, worse, anti-Semitic? Yet there are definite signs of Holocaust fatigue. Perhaps because she is a survivor, Ms. Slesin is more forthright than most. “I can’t bear to see evil over and over again,” she says. “Even I roll my eyes when I hear about another Holocaust documentary” ? but then she quickly adds, “until I see what it’s about.”

The New York Times reports on Milton Rogovin:

Mr. Rogovin is rightly regarded as one of this country’s most important social-documentary photographers, in the tradition of Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White. The Library of Congress deemed him worthy of posterity by accepting his entire archive of negatives in 1999. Beginning June 17 and running through Sept. 14, his work will be on display at the New-York Historical Society in an exhibition called “Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones.”

The most striking aspect of Mr. Rogovin’s evocative work is its utter naturalism. While he captured many people in bleak surroundings, his photographs reflect no condescension or pity — or prettification — but rather an appreciation of the lives being shown. His subjects appear in wedding dresses, holding babies or hanging out on the street. Almost as powerful as the faces are the backdrops: the stoops, the religious artifacts on coffee tables, bodies decorated with tattoos, parlor walls decorated with family pictures and sometimes with racks holding the family guns.

NPR features photos from the exhibit along with more details about his work:

In his late 40s, Rogovin began to phase out his optometric practice to concentrate on photographing the denizens of the Lower West Side. Once a working-class Italian neighborhood, the area had become home to African-American, Puerto Rican, Native-American and poor white families. He went out seeking, in his words, “the poorest of the poor,” hoping to create on film a sympathetic portrait of their daily struggle for survival: “I wanted to really show them as decent human beings,” he says.

Cinemania is a documentary about the total movie fan:

Cinemania is potentially the most disturbing film of the festival if you see yourself anywhere on the sliding scale between regular film goer and film buff. Filmmakers Angela Christlieb & Stephen Kijak’s documentary follows a small group of New York-based buffs as they spen their lives watching movies and obsessing over them. It’s very likely you’ll be able to identify with some of the quirks of these people, and with this realisation may come panic.

The film about obsessive documentary film goers would be short on people to interview, no?

All Africa reports on a raid on documentary filmmakers Edwina and Newton Spicer production facilities where police confiscated equipment used in producing their documentaries.

At midnight (local time) on 6 June 2003, eight men wearing police uniforms and driving four police cars raided the home of film and documentary producer Edwina Spicer in the capital, Harare. They took away video cameras, recording equipment, a fax machine and Z$50,000 (approx. US$62), an undisclosed source told MISA Zimbabwe.

Spicer and her family were away on holiday in England at the time of the raid. The men, who said they were police officers, beat the gardener, maid and guards at Spicer’s home. The gardener received treatment for a dislocated bone at the Avenues Clinic in Harare. The men said they were looking for guns.

A tremendous documenty project of Quicktime VR panoramic photographs of all the UNESCO World Heritage sites here. Interested in making your own Quicktime VR panoramic photos? Look at this case study here about the Parma Baptistrey and Dumoa Quicktime VR project featured here.

A collection of photo essays from The Washington Post on a range of themes from the Drogon People of Mali to Life in the Ozarks. See it here.

A mini-documentary news brief on the intelligence of monkeys from animal cognition researcher Herbert Terrace here. And another mini-documentary on documentaries by children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors here.

Anemona Hartocollis of The New York Times writes about David Friedman, who was featured in the critically acclaimed documentary Capturing The Friedmans:

He and his family signed releases for the movie, thinking it would be about clowns; and at first it was. Then one day, Mr. Friedman says, the director set up the cameras in Silly Billy’s living room and announced that he had discovered the family secret and was shifting focus. Mr. Jarecki had found his Pagliacci. Mr. Friedman felt betrayed. The middle brother, Seth, withdrew from the project.

In the end, Mr. Friedman cooperated because he hoped the movie would induce his brother’s accusers to come forward and exonerate him. (His father died in prison in 1995, a possible suicide; his brother was released 18 months ago and now goes to Hunter College.)

In the wake of the movie, which opened 10 days ago, Mr. Friedman’s chronic insomnia is worse than ever. Though his career is unblemished, the old fears are back. Who will hire the son of a convicted child molester as a children’s party clown?

In another article by the Times here:

“Capturing the Friedmans” is the most compelling American movie I’ve seen in ages, and one of the most astonishing debut features ever. (Mr. Jarecki, 40, made only one previous film, a short.) It has been praised, and rightly so, for its nonpolemical dramatization of a story that exemplifies a widespread hysteria of the late 1980’s, when witch hunts for pedophiles ran amok in day-care centers from Massachusetts to California. It has also been justly celebrated for its unexpectedly tender and even-handed treatment of the Friedmans themselves. Some of their tragedies — warring parents, a history of divorce, the long shadow of a child who died young — are not limited to those families whose members are charged with sex crimes. The brainy, upscale, at times routinely neurotic Friedmans are calibrated by Mr. Jarecki with an anguished precision and wit worthy of Philip Roth.

But “Capturing the Friedmans” also achieves something that only rare movies do: it makes us look at the world from a different angle. It’s a corrective to an era when many Americans are addicted to appearing in or watching reality TV that distorts reality, and when actual reality (sometimes known as the news) is often souped up just as much as the glossy “reality” of “Survivor.” Mr. Jarecki tries to reawaken us to the notion that reality can’t always be definitive. In a 24/7 TV nation of exhibitionists and voyeurs, those of us in the audience must examine a bit more discerningly and skeptically what is presented to us daily as The Truth.

David Thomson of The New York Times writes about avante garde documentary filmmaker, Chris Marker:

In this country, thanks to the example of people like Richard Leacock and Frederick Wiseman, modern documentary means cinéma vérité — extensive filming of true-life situations with the least possible authorial intervention. The camera records human untidiness, and the pain of duration, and the audience becomes a kind of voyeuristic participant. Commentary is rejected. As a school, it has had its moments — and monotonies.

Mr. Marker is far less impressed by the camera’s neutrality or its ability to record things whole. He loves imagery, but does not trust it. His essential influences — Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov — are filmmakers who explored montage (or editing) as a stimulus to argument. Pictures come to life if we are looking, thinking, testing; they demand definition, not just awed witness.

Above all, Mr. Marker sees that imagery has become a chief resort of our collective memory — but in a way that stresses our isolation as much as our involvement. To adapt the critic John Berger (another Markerian) a little: photographs evoke presence and absence at the same time. We are there, in the scene, yet cut off from it. It is the model for so much of modern experience — our amazing ability to acquire information usually depends on some distancing mechanism. We do not know things so much as pretend to know them.

An online documentary about video game culture here:

I’ve made a documentary about gamers using footage & interviews from a LAN I went to in Brighton.

The main purpose of this documentary is to address the main pre-conceptions people have about gamers, ie: is it really anti-social? is it only for geeks? is it a non-productive use of time?

It’s taken me a long time to put this film together & I’d really appreciate your thoughts on it. Do you think it gives a fair representation of modern day gamers?

The IFP Los Angeles Film Festival starts June 11th and runs through the 21st. Among there documentary offerings:

Sumo East/West – Ferne Pearlstein’s visually arresting Sumo East/West examines not only the history of Sumo in Japan, but also its future worldwide. We meet the wrestlers themselves, including the first non-Japanese grand champion, a wrestler turned rapper, and the highly controversial women wrestlers. Fri., June 13, 9:30 p.m. (Sunset 5); Sun., June 15, 2:00 p.m. (DGA)

Whole – We guarantee you’ve never seen a film like Whole, Melody Gilbert’s one-of-a-kind documentary about a growing culture of amputee “wannabes” who willingly amputate themselves for no apparent medical reason. Thu., June 12, 9:30 p.m. (DGA); Fri., June 13, 5:00 p.m. (Sunset 5)

Orange County’s Register Jonathan Curiel negatively criticizes Oliver Stone’s latest documentary on Israeli-Palestinian conflict saying:

His name and reputation get him access to the world’s top leaders – whether it’s Fidel Castro or Shimon Peres – but that doesn’t mean Oliver Stone is an insightful interviewer, and it certainly doesn’t mean he can spin his on-camera reporting into a worthwhile documentary.

Instead, Stone ends up with “Persona Non Grata,” a film about Israelis and Palestinians that HBO calls “timely” but that should really be labeled an exercise in selfish cinema. Selfish because Stone turns the camera on himself too many times. Selfish because Stone thinks he can reveal everlasting truths about the Middle East by spending just five days in Israel and the West Bank. Selfish because Stone uses his trademark film techniques (like shaky handheld camera shots), which might suit his “Natural Born Killers” but in a serious documentary become mere gimmicks.

Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times agrees, somewhat, saying:

Oliver Stone titled his HBO documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “Persona Non Grata.” But a more fitting title might be “Persona Gratissima.” Tonight’s 67-minute film is not really about the West Bank and Jerusalem; it is a deliberately self-conscious look at Oliver Stone making a documentary about the conflict.

On Mr. Stone’s first day in the Palestinian territories, a cameraman from the local Reuters bureau asks how long he plans to stay. “That is like the wind,” he replies with the majestic obliquity of a desert prophet. “You never know here. It blows in four directions at once.”

The sixth international environmental film festival, organized by the Turkish Cinema and Audiovisual Culture Foundation (TURSAK), will take place on June 5-13 in Istanbul. Some 60 features films and documentaries from a host of countries will be screened during the festival, including three films from Documentary Educational Resources (DER): Benjamin and His Brother, A Kalahari Family, Herdsmen.

Is the question promted by sites such as Michael More Hates America and Revoke Michael Moore’s Oscar, a matter of ethics, truth, pride, or hate? It is certainly not the first time a documentary film has been accused of being more fiction than fact. It is, I would argue, an old argument to say that documentary filmmaking is about telling the truth, rather documentary filmmaking is about social representation and that films contain truth if we decide that they do (read Bill Nichols).

Will documentary film continue to saddle the stigma and tricky onus of truth or will it move beyond the idea that documentary is supposed to represent some absolute truth? What should documentary represent?

The Guardian reports on a new documentary on acclaimed writer, Thomas Phynchon.

Directed by Fosco and Donatello Dubini, it’s a thoughtful and disturbing portrait of America at its most paranoid: the assassination of JFK (did Pynchon meet Lee Harvey Oswald on a train and was Oswald part of a government mind-control experiment?), Timothy “turn-on, tune-in, drop-out” Leary (was he a CIA stooge?), Operation Paperclip (when the US military rounded up Nazi scientists and brought them to America), the Vietnam war, the Cuban missile crisis, and so on. There is even some unpleasant footage of a ginger cat on LSD.

Pynchon’s counter-culture credentials are at odds with his past. He served in the US Navy and worked at Boeing during the era of the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile programme. Is Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) a confession, an attempt to expiate some past sin? What exactly are his reasons for staying out of the public eye? Is he just exceptionally shy or does he have something to hide? (When Gravity’s Rainbow won the National Book Award, his publisher sent an actor to accept the prize.)

UC Berkeley’s Media Resources Center exhibits Reel Life Stories.

…an exhibit that traces and celebrates the evolution of documentary film and filmmaking over the course of the past century, from the early cinematic experiments of brothers August and Louis Lumière, to the diverse and provocative works of today’s independent documentary filmmakers. The exhibit includes photographs, posters, filmographies, filmmaking artifacts and memorabilia, and video displays, and highlights the notable documentary collections of the Media Resources Center, Moffitt Libraries.

A video tour of the exhibit (Real Media) here. The Reel Life Stories website offers a wealth of documentation on documentaries such as an exhaustive bibliographic resource and a well-researched timeline of important documentary events throughout history.

Betty Blowtorch and Her Amazing True Life Adventures chronicles the “loud angry fuck you” rise and fall and rebirth of a girl punk band. The official site here.

This documentary, among others, will screen as part of the AFI At Arclight Second Annual Music Documentary Series running from June 4th to July 9th. Among the other music documentaries are: Wattstax, If I Should Fall From Grace - The Shane MacGowan Story, Hype!, Breath Control: The History of The Human Beat Box, and Fischerspooner #1. More information about the festival here.