Hindustan Times reports on the Indian government restricting documentaries from screening without a censorship certificate from the government’s Film Division (FD):

The filmmakers-versus-FD battle is now out in the open. Over 100 leading members of the Indian documentary filmmaking fraternity, several of them Golden Conch winners, have submitted a letter to the Union information and broadcasting minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, protesting against the FD decision. Is the government willing to pay heed to their appeal?

If it doesn’t, it would be tantamount to a complete travesty of justice especially in the light of the fact that the FD has made a distinction between Indian and foreign films. Its mandatory censorship clause is applicable only to films made in the country; films from outside can get in without any intervention. This discriminatory step militates against all principles of fair play. It puts Indian filmmakers at a clear disadvantage and they have threatened a complete boycott of MIFF 2004.

When is documentary censorship good for the public?

Creative Commons provides an open catalog of Creative Commons licensed content, including documentary video footage, here.

One video among the archive is Eric Saltzman’s documentary on a criminal case of assault with intent to commit murder.

The film (approx. 1 hr 40 mins, originally broadcast on ABC News) begins within minutes of the shooting and continues after the suspect’s arrest. The program shows events in the criminal justice system normally hidden from the public: numerous jailhouse sessions between the defendant and his public defender attorneys; the preparation of the case by defense, police and prosecution; and interviews with witnesses and the victim. It culminates with the jury trial and verdict.

View it here.

Dolby Laboratories provides reference materials for TV audio here. Learn about Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound here.

Converting projects from one editing system to another is now easier with Sebsky Tools.

Sebsky Tools is a Freeware application consisting of five utilities, each aimed at helping to move editing projects between Avid Media Composer (Avid) and Final Cut Pro (FCP) made by Apple Computer.

The Gate reports on the documentary featuring stupidity:

Stupidity sets out to determine whether our culture is hooked on stupidity. From Adam Sandler to George W. Bush, from the IQ test to peace activists, to the origins of the word moron, Stupidity examines the “dumbing down” of contemporary culture. Stupidity embarks on an exhaustive search into its meaning, and the implications of a culture that is obsessed and saturated with stupidity. Stupidity careens at warp speed through sound bites on topics from television news and reality TV shows, to Internet sites and popular films. Featuring opinions and comments from some of today’s most recognizable figures, cultural critics, authors and academics, including John Cleese, Noam Chomsky, Salma Hayek and Bill Maher, Stupidity reveals that, despite our culture’s extensive access to knowledge and information, humans continue to choose stupidity.

The official site and the trailer here.

MoveMaker reports on the Panasonic SDX900.

Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s program archives reports BBC News:

Mr Dyke said on Sunday that everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet.

The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes, Mr Dyke added.

We’re looking forward to having access to their excellent science documentary programs from Horizon.

Of course, as we’ve noted here earlier, PBS already provides, for free, many of their documentary programs online. If you’re interested in science programming from PBS, check out Scientific American Frontiers video archive here.

After a life of high-profile public relations image herding, Dan Klores turned the camera on himself and his friend and in the processes, made an autobiographical documentary.

And it is hard to believe, after he finally hits the play button and the movie has rolled through its 91 minutes, that this film came from the same hand that manipulated so many of the gaudy holograms that dance across the roomy skies of celebrity. For on the screen in his living room are no stars with manicured stories. Instead, there are ordinary men in their 50’s, fat and skinny, comical and tragic, divorced in bitterness, devoted in marriage, Harvard-trained in psychology and homeless in the Port Authority bus terminal. They are lottery winners, drug addicts, star athletes, intellects, fools, all friends of Klores’s from the same playground in Brighton Beach. They reel backward in time and forward in recollection, carried along by grainy old film footage and interviews that trace the spray of fortunes running from their teenage years in the 1960’s to middle age.

Read more about the documentary here from The New York Times Magazine.

Earth Station 5, an international software group, recently threatened the Motion Picture Association of America:

Earthstation 5 is at war with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Record Association of America (RIAA), and to make our point very clear that their governing laws and policys have absolutely no meaning to us here in Palestine, we will continue to add even more movies [to our file-sharing software] for FREE.

Apple’s Dale Ellis demonstrates an animated-still technique here at LAFCPUG:

“[It] involves separating and animating elements within a static photograph to create the illusion of movement. This effect was used extensively in the documentary of Producer Robert Evans’ life, “The Kid Stays in the Picture.” It’s a neat alternative to the Ken Burns pan-and-scan effect.

Stephen Holden of The New York Times reports on Sarah George’s documentary on traveling hobos in, “Catching Out.”

When focusing on its four main subjects, “Catching Out,” which opens today at the Film Forum in Manhattan, is an absorbing, picturesque group portrait. Although the filmmaker clearly admires her subjects, she does not shy away from showing the strains of fanaticism and arrogance that run through their stories. But the movie jumps track, as it were, near the end, when it scurries to put the hobo life into a broader social context. It turns away from its four protagonists to examine hobo conventions and to take a cursory look at the generation gap between the old-style hobos and the younger, more reckless breed of itinerant scavenger.

The International Rescue Committee is awarding $2,000-$4,000 each to up to three documentary works on “the lives of newly arrived refugee women, children, and adolescents and their integration into local communities.” Contact Quocn@theirc.org or go to theirc.org/community. Deadline: September 12th, 2003. (Thanks Youth Media Network)

Good news for the independent filmmaker. The Independent reports that cell-phone text messaging is killing carefully crafted marketing blockbuster-movie campaigns:

The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

“In the old days, there used to be a term, ‘buying your gross,’ ” Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. “You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience.”

A folk-documentary on renewable energy:

Power From The People is an award-winning documentary about the fight to distribute home-brewed renewable energy over the nation’s power grid.

This documentary features Richard Perez of Home Power magazine, two of the original Guerrilla Solars, future Iowa wind farmers, and a grass roots coalition of renewable energy lobbyists all striving for small scale renewable energy distribution. It shows the struggles they face, how they challenge and subvert utility resistance, and why renewable energy distribution just makes common sense.

Official site here.

Frontline, a PBS funded documentary news program, streams all of its programs via the web. Topics range from television arriving in Bhutan and tracking the secret operations of international gun smugglers in Sierra Leone to American porn and North Korea’s nuclear arms race. Watch these programs and more here and here.

From Video Store Magazine:

The filmmaker [J.T.S. Moore] is making the upcoming DVD edition of Revolution OS both region-free and CSS-encryption-free, in keeping with the Open Source Movement depicted in the movie, a documentary look at the development of the Linux computer operating system.

Moore, a film school graduate, doesn’t call himself a documentarian, but rather “a filmmaker who made a documentary.” He did a documentary “because it was cheaper than a feature film,” and a Stanford classmate who was involved with Linux jokingly suggested that he do a film on the operating system.

Hugh Purcell of The BBC reports on India’s eminent documentary film director, Anand Patwardhan newest epic, War and Peace:

Patwardhan is a true “auteur” who makes films from his own convictions rather than on commission; who spends his own money and dedicates years of his own time to the making of a movie that becomes a personal statement - a statement that he hopes will be a force for change.

He is both director and technician. He is his own cameraman and, probably more important to him, his own editor.

In his studio he spends hours with all the attention to detail of a perfectionist forming an aesthetic - a use of symbols, motifs and images – that lifts his documentaries above simple “reportage”.

War and Peace offers a perspective of a view hardly seen at all in the West - the growing nuclear escalation between India and Pakistan that could plunge us all into ruin.

Filmed over three tumultuous years in India, Pakistan, Japan and the United States, after the 1998 nuclear tests on the Indian sub-continent, WAR AND PEACE is the long awaited new film by India’s leading documentary filmmaker, Anand Patwardhan. It documents the current, epic journey of peace activism in the face of global militarism and war.

Reuters’ Etan Vlessing reports on the Toronto International FIlm Festival documentary line up:

Themes of war and political turmoil dominate the documentary lineup unveiled Tuesday for the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 4-13).

The Real to Reel documentary sidebar will include the North American premieres of Errol Morris’ “The Fog of War,” a portrait of Vietnam War-era Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara; Jonathan Demme’s “The Agronomist,” a profile of Haitian political activist Jean Dominique; and the Canadian premiere of Rithy Panh’s “S21, the Khmer Rouge Machine of Death,” an account of genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

The official film festival site here.

Documentary Educational Resources recently contributed Mercy to the Peace Corp’s International Workshop on HIV and AIDS. Mercy documents the story of a girl who was orpahened by parents with AIDS in Thailand.

A fascinating historical look at the forgotten museum of Henry Wellcome, a collector of “the preservation of health and life.”

One hundred and fifty years after his birth, this exhibition reunites a cross-section of extraordinary objects from his forgotten museum, ranging from diagnostic dolls to Japanese sex aids, and from Napoleon’s toothbrush to George III’s hair. It also features ‘The Phantom Museum’ - a specially commissioned film by the Brothers Quay.

There are some nice audio pieces (such as “How and why shrunken heads were made”) about objects found within the collection as well as excerpts from the surrealist Brother’s Quay film.

Christopher Lydon documents important internet luminaries such as Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Eugene Volokh and Dave Winer with his audio interviews. Go ahead and listen and learn how his guests use the web and what they have to offer us.

Craigslist, the popular online community and market-place recieves the documentary treatment in Michael Ferris Gibson’s new documentary:

“We want to show how Craigslist is the digital commons,” the 32-year-old director said Monday in Zealot’s “war room” — a sunny loft strewn with bags of bagels, energy bars and bottled water in San Francisco’s gritty South of Market district.

“We want to show how it preserves the freethinking, young, intelligent, anti-capitalist attitude of people trying to save the world.”

The official site here.