Since its inception in 1999, DocAviv has become one of the leading cultural events in Israel with the aim of promoting Israeli and international documentary film. ITVS’s Claire Aguilar attended the 2012 DocAviv International Film Festival May 3-12, as a juror for Israeli Competition.

Over the last 10 years, Israel has become one of the leading sources of independently-produced documentary films.  There is a dizzying abundance of documentary films and filmmakers in Israel — and not only are there many, they have also been successful: showcased in international festivals, sold to broadcasters in Israel and in the U.S. and Europe, winning prizes and garnering international press.  It has been amazing to witness the growth of strong, innovative, and diverse Israeli films — covering subjects that you would expect to see from Israeli filmmakers, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict — but also covering the personal and global experience, films about family, identity, and culture, with other films covering globalization, immigration, and homophobia.

I heard from one filmmaker that there are at least 20 film schools in Israel, and that is mostly counting only Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.  The community of documentary filmmakers is intimate, diverse, and full of talent — and here at ITVS, we have been fortunate to work with many Israeli filmmakers over the past eight years and have showcased them on U.S. public television: Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, Dalit Kimor’s Pickles, Inc., Yoav Shamir’s Flipping Out, Ran Tal’s The Children of the Sun, Nati Baratz’s Unmistaken Child, Ruthie Shatz, and Adi Baratz’s The Collaborator and His Family, and many others.

So it was a great honor for me to be invited to this year’s DocAviv as a juror for Israeli Competition. DocAviv is Tel Aviv’s largest film festival and is dedicated exclusively to documentary cinema — since 1999, it has showcased documentaries from Israel and around the world. The films are screened in the newly remodeled Tel Aviv Cinematheque, but there were also many open-air screenings in the beautiful Port of Tel Aviv.

Sinai Abt, the artistic director of DocAviv, was the first broadcaster on-board with the iconic animated documentary Waltz with Bashir when he was the commissioning editor at Israel’s Channel 8. He and his team selected 12 films to compete for the Best Israeli Documentary and he also asked our jury to select the award winners for Best Debut Film, Special Jury Mention, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Research Award.  I had a wonderful jury team, including Asako Fujioka from the Yamagata Film Festival, filmmaker Sivan Arbel, cinematographer Itzik Portal, and Executive Producer for Films Transit Diana Holtzberg.

We gave the awards to the following films:

Best Israeli Film Award:  Home Movie (Dir. Reuven Brodsky)
Special Jury Mention:  The Invisible Men (Dir. Yariv Moser)
Mayor of Tel Aviv-Yafo Award for Debut Film:  Powder (Dir. Ayal Goldberg)
Best Cinematography Award:  Home Movie (Cinematography by Reuven Brodsky and Itamar Mendes-Flor)
Best Editing Award:  Powder (Editing by Erez Laufer, Ayal Goldberg)
Best Research Award: One Day After Peace  (Dirs. Mimi Laufer, Erez Laufer)

Thursday marks the end of the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival, which featured three ITVS funded documentary films, including Bitter Seeds, The Invisible War, and The Waiting Room.

Still from Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey (credit: Ninfa Z. Bito)

The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival is closing tonight on a high note, celebrating their festival journey with…. well, Journey! After a rousing screening of Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey at the Castro Theatre, including what is bound to be a fascinating Q&A with director Ramona S. Diaz (director of the ITVS funded documentaries Imelda and The Learning) and all five members of the band Journey, closing night attendees will head on over to SLOANE SQUARE[D], for a night of entertainment, dancing, food, and drinks.

The past 15 days have gone by so fast that it is hard to believe that another festival has come and gone. With more than 200 films screened and more than 45 countries represented, the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival proved once again to be an extraordinary showcase of innovation and cinematic discovery.

One particular highlight for ITVS was that The Waiting Room director Peter Nicks was featured on the festival’s Scoop du Jour website, a daily video feed presenting coverage of the happenings at the festival. In the interview, Nicks discusses his documentary The Waiting Room, an intimate and intense day-in-the-life documentary portrait of the patients, doctors, nurses, and social workers at Highland Hospital in Oakland. Check out the clip after the jump:

To learn more about the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival, click here.

ITVS’s Claire Aguilar attended the 11th annual Tribeca Film Festival this past April, participating in the Tribeca Film Institute’s Filmmaker Pitch Workshop and acting as a juror for the Tribeca All Access Documentary Program.

Tribeca Film Institute Industry Meetings

For the past five years, ITVS has participated in the Tribeca Film Festival in many different capacities, from the funder of films selected for the festival (this year included Stephen Maing’s High Tech, Low Life, Beth Murphy’s The List, and Jerry Rothwell’s Town of Runners), to hosting special screenings of ITVS films (FUTURESTATES), ITVS’s involvement in this iconic festival is always varied and exciting.

Two special events this year included participation in Tribeca’s Interactive Day (attended by ITVS’s Karim Ahmad) and Tribeca All Access, a year-round initiative that supports the careers of filmmakers who hail from communities traditionally under-represented in the film industry. Tribeca All Access has been a successful and groundbreaking industry event, fostering and supporting diverse filmmaking voices through industry meetings, development support, and mentoring.

(L) Yoruba Richen (director), The New Black and (R) S. Leo Chiang (director), Outrun

This year I was honored to participate in the 2012 Tribeca All Access Documentary Program as a juror for the Documentary Creative Promise Award.  The award gives one documentary film $10,000 for its creative potential, innovation, and promise as a compelling and unique film.  My fellow jurors included Julie Goldman, Eugene Hernandez, Debbie Zimmerman, and Jean Tsien. Out of the five films proposed this year, the award went to Yoruba Richen’s The New Black. Congratulations to Yoruba and her producers Yvonne Welbon and Angela Tucker on the Creative Promise award!

I also participated at the Tribeca Film Institute’s Filmmaker Pitch Workshop, which gathered TFI’s newly-minted filmmakers with industry pitch producers in order to help formulate their pitches for their upcoming industry meetings. This event, held at the Hotel Griffou restaurant, known for its darkly romantic Eyes Wide Shut-like décor, was designed to help producer teams practice their pitches with industry mentors.  Along with producer Julie Goldman and director Dawn Porter, I helped the teams guide their pitches and offered feedback for the week’s industry meetings. Included in our group were Two Children of the Red Mosque with Hemal Trivedi (director), Mohammad Naqvi (co-director), Whitney Dow (producer) and Jonathan Goodman Levitt (producer); Desert Stars with Raouf Zaki (director/producer) and Frank McDonnell (producer); The Human Experiment with Dana Nachman (director/producer), Don Hardy (director/producer), and Chelsea Matter (producer); and Outrun with Leo Chiang (director) and Johnny Symons (producer). The producers and directors did a dry run of their pitch and showed materials, either a trailer or selected scenes.   It was a fantastic opportunity for producers to rehearse their pitch in a supportive environment consisting of their peers and other industry professionals offering feedback, a great method to break the ice before launching into a pitch and also a beneficial networking opportunity.

Two Children of the Red Mosque Team: (L to R) Jonathan Goodman Levitt, Hemal Trivedi, Whitney Dow, and Mohammad Naqvi

I wish that we could have this rehearsal arrangement with every one-on-one pitch meeting for documentary producers but unfortunately, most opportunities often represent speed-dating with meetings only 15-20 minutes long.

Some pointers for producers for one-on-one meetings (from the other side of the table):

• Introduce yourself and clearly communicate your name and what your role is (director, producer, intern, etc.).  This may seem totally elementary, but I can’t tell you how many meetings have started without an introduction of participants. I often leave a meeting only remembering that I spoke with a man with a pierced eyebrow and blond hair…

• Prior to your meeting, do your research. Depending on who you are meeting with, you can achieve various objectives by being prepared. Know what they can do for the project – if they’re a broadcaster, go on the website and research their editorial line and parameters. If you are meeting with a funder, read their guidelines and deadlines. If it is an engagement professional or sales agent, look at their past campaigns or films.

• Don’t assume that everyone has had time to thoroughly review your materials beforehand. If they haven’t, you will want to start your pitch from scratch (including showing materials that you have already circulated).

• If you’re screening from a computer or iPad, bring headphones.  These environments are noisy and distracting so it’s very difficult to hear or concentrate without them.

• Skip the hand-outs:  business cards are good, but DVDs, one-sheets, and postcards – um, no thanks. These days if you have additional material to share, I would rather get a vimeo link rather than have to lug around press kits and DVDs all day.

• If your meeting is a follow-up meeting, then pick up where your last interaction ended.  If your meeting person hasn’t screened your work-in-progress or sample yet, don’t worry – you can ping them about it later.  Use the opportunity to give them a production update or any other news about the project since you last met.

• Last tip:  welcome the opportunity for feedback – and listen!  Remember that it is about a relationship and the key is interaction.  You can have a forceful and compelling pitch, but if you don’t leave room for a reaction, then its energy wasted.

Click here to learn more about the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. 

The San Francisco Film Society is encouraging opening night attendees to go French glam for tonight’s Farewell, My Queen screening by filmmaker Benoît Jacquot. Join the convivial throng at the Castro Theatre for a special screening then head to a lavish party at the elegant contemporary art gallery Terra in SOMA to enjoy hors d’oeuvres from local restaurants, sophisticated cocktails and, of course, dancing.

Unable to join in on the opening night festivities? Not to worry, Bay Area film fanatics have 15 full days of the best in world cinema to soak up before the festival closes on May 3, 2012. With more than 200 films in the lineup and more than 45 countries represented, the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival is an extraordinary showcase of innovation and cinematic discovery.

ITVS has a strong presence in the documentary category, with Bitter Seeds, The Invisible War, and The Waiting Room all in the festival lineup. For film descriptions and screening information, please see below.

Bitter Seeds by Micha Peled

Biotechnology is changing the way farming is done all over the world. Advocates believe the “New Green Revolution” is the only way to provide sufficient food for the world’s growing population while opponents raise environmental concerns and fear that GMOs drive small-scale farmers off the land. Bitter Seeds explores the controversy — from a village in India that uses genetically modified seeds to U.S. government agencies that promote them. Click here for screening and ticket information.

The Invisible War by Kirby Dick

Winner of an audience award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, this moving indictment of the systematic coverup of military sex crimes chronicles women’s struggles to rebuild their lives and fight for justice. Interviews with high-ranking officials and members of Congress confront the military’s epidemic of rape, leading to a forceful call for change. Click here for screening and ticket information.

The Waiting Room by Peter Nicks

The Waiting Room is a cinema verité portrait of a California city’s public safety-net hospital as it struggles to handle patient overload in a swooning economy and a constantly shifting landscape of health care policy. Click here for screening and ticket information.

To learn more about the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival, click here.

ITVS Senior Staff Writer Eric Martin, filed this report from the 2012 Full Frame Film Festival, which ran April 12-April 15 in Durham, N.C..

The Waiting Room held its world premiere at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

The Full Frame Film Festival turned 15 years old this year in Durham, N.C., where I happen to live right now, and it’s no surprise that the well-attended, four-day, 100+ documentary extravaganza, which ended Sunday, included a meaty slate of ITVS and Independent Lens projects packed with something for everyone.

Eating Alabama, funded through ITVS’s station-focused LINCS program, delighted the farm-to-table crowd in this food-crazed city of 220,000 that’s home to a bevy The New York Times-featured restaurants and reportedly 80-some food trucks.   The House I Live In, Putin’s Kiss, Detropia, The Invisible War, and Love Free Or Die all brought with them the buzz they’d started building at Sundance back in January.  Bernardo Ruiz zipped down from New York for the U.S. premiere of his film Reportero, which will air on P.O.V.’s upcoming season.  Stanley Nelson was everywhere, discussing work at the many screenings of his career retrospective, which included A Place of Our Own, which first aired on Independent Lens in 2004.

And then there was the world premiere of the Peter Nicks-directed The Waiting Room, which is slated to air on the 2012-2013 season of Independent Lens.  It started the weekend as one of the most talked about ITVS-funded films at the festival and left with the Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award, a juried prize honoring a first-time documentary feature director.

Full Frame has a reputation as a venue where documentary filmmakers come to hang out, see each other’s work, and talk shop, somewhat free from the shadow of actors, celebrity media, and deal-making that some festivals are known for.  At Full Frame’s many, well-attended social events, producers shared tips on the cheapest place to rent Mark IV equipment in Nairobi and directors divulged how interviews snuck into their once purely-observational documentary.  The films and panels were well attended, and my sampling caught some of the following highlights:

• A long sold-out screening of the Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry was interrupted for 20 minutes by paramedics attending to a viewer (successfully), and then ended with filmmaker Alison Klayman unable to speak because she’d lost her voice (the kind of strange things that almost seemed appropriate for the boundary-busting artist profiled on screen).

• A standing room only distribution panel with Steve Nemeth (Rhino Films), James Ackerman (Documentary Channel), Andrew Catauro (POV), Jason Janego (Radius TWC of the The Weinstein Company) and Molly Thompson (A&E) riddled with interesting questions like “If there was a feature-length version of KONY 2012 for sale, would it have sold?” and “Are we all going to be watching movies on Facebook in five years?”

• A window into the vibrant regional filmmaking scene at the Southern Documentary Fund screening of three “in-the-works” projects, including the intriguing Can’t Stop the Water with its collision of the Louisiana Bayou, global warming, and Cajun/Native American identity.

Most of all, however, I walked away with the feeling of awe and respect for documentary filmmakers, ITVS-funded or not, whose passion for storytelling shone through everything I heard and saw.

Play by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman

Play, written and directed by David Kaplan and game designer Eric Zimmerman, imagines a not-too-distant future where video games have become indistinguishable from reality. It was a fan favorite when it was first released online in 2010 on FUTURESTATES.TV. We hope it will be just as much of a hit this time around and be a contender for the shorts festival’s audience award. If you’d like to vote for it (hint, hint), follow this link to PBS.org and “like” it with the Facebook like button.

We were honored to have three other ITVS films selected for the shorts festival, including Bullet Proof Vest, Sunshine: Single Dads, and Women and Girls Lead: Meet Beverly. You can vote for all of them on PBS.org. The festival consisted of 20 high-quality short films produced by independent filmmakers in partnership with organizations such as  POV, National Black Programming Consortium, Center for Asian American Media, Latino Public Broadcasting, Native American Public Telecommunications and Pacific Islanders in Communications. We applaud PBS on an outstanding job of producing and curating this first-ever online presentation and for bringing new audiences to diverse and independent film from our public media family. We are looking forward to next year!

What will be of America in 5, 25, or even 50 years from today? This series of independent mini-features, short narrative films created by established filmmakers and emerging talents, explores possible future scenarios through the lens of today’s global realities. Immerse yourself in the visions of these independent filmmakers as they inhabit a future of their own imagining.

The screening will take place on Saturday, April 21 at 2PM at the Tribeca Cinemas (54 Varick Street) in New York City, followed by a Q&A with many of the FUTURESTATES filmmakers, including Jennifer Phang (Advantageous), Patrick Stettner (Gunny), and Trevin Matcek (Life Begins at Rewirement).

To attend, please RSVP to rsvp@itvs.org

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes filmmaker Byron Hurt

The event, which takes place exclusively online, will feature special guests Jimmie Briggs, founder and director of Man Up, and Dr. Kaila Story, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of Louisville.

Participants can join for free by signing in with Facebook or directly on the site, interacting with other viewers and panelists in real-time, while watching the film. Viewers can comment, ask questions, take polls, and even express their feelings about what they’re watching through a variety of tools on the site. This is an entirely new way of experiencing documentary films and it is inherently social.

Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes: March 28, 2012, 1PM PT/4PM ET
Presented in partnership with the National Black Programming Consortium and Man Up.
To participate in this screening click this link.

Sparking dialogue on hip-hop and its declarations on gender, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes provides thoughtful insight from divergent points of view, including rap artists, industry executives, rap fans, and social critics from inside and outside the hip-hop generation. The film includes interviews with famous rappers such as Mos Def, Fat Joe, Chuck D, Jadakiss, and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons; along with commentary from Michael Eric Dyson, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Kevin Powell, and Sarah Jones.

This online social screening is part of a month long online film festival presented by Women and Girls Lead featuring a collection of documentary films by prominent independent filmmakers. These films showcase extraordinary women and girls on the front lines of changing the world.

To learn more about the Women and Girls Lead initiative, click here.

Watch Sunshine: Single Dads on PBS. See more from PBS Online Film Festival.

Dig deep into your roots and welcome diversity with this week’s ‘Who Are We?’ shorts. ITVS is proud to have Sunshine: Single Dads, a short companion piece to the ITVS documentary Sunshine. In this short, single parenthood becomes even more complicated when the parent is a father and that father is gay. Sunshine: Single Dads tells the male side of one family’s unconventional parenting journey across generations.

PBS will announce the People’s Choice Winner on April 16th, so be sure to vote for your favorite film by clicking on the “like” button after watching the videos.

For a complete listing of short included in the PBS Online Film Festival, please click here.

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals (March 9-18, 2012) offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. 

As the line between film and digital projects continues to blur, it makes perfect sense that the Interactive and Film portions of SXSW run concurrently (along with ScreenBurn- the gaming tract), followed closely by the Music portion.  Social TV, the crossover between television viewing and social media, was a topic mentioned quite often during many of the sessions I attended.

Although this was my first time at SXSW (and Austin), I heard that the Interactive portion has grown quite significantly over the past few years; now being held in nine different locations with complimentary shuttles for badge holders to move freely between them (although I preferred to walk, despite the persistent rain!).  Moreover, the Interactive conference is broken down into 18 different themes, each being housed in a specific building, so you really do not need to move between the different buildings if you intend to focus on a single track.

There are multiple ways to attend SXSW.  Some people I spoke with planned to attend as many of the keynote presentations and panels that they could during the day, while others chose to only attend a few sessions, instead focusing on the networking and meetup events.   Add to the mix the corporate sponsored parties that occur at the end of each conference day (supplying free food, drinks, music, and of course, networking opportunities!), or visits to one of the branded venues (CNN SXSW Grill, Fast Company Grill, Bing popup lounge, or the Nokia Labs – an extremely large blowup igloo structure), and the days can become quite long and exhausting.  And just in case SXSW hasn’t provided enough entertainment options for you, there are also film screenings, comedy shows, and live music events occurring all around Austin.

Whichever way you decide to participate in SXSW, be prepared to arrive early and to wait in line once you get there.  Believe me, the wait is usually worth it. However, if you didn’t actually get into the conference sessions during the day, quite a few were videotaped and posted to the SXSW YouTube Channel.  Planning to attend SXSW 2013? I suggest you book your hotel soon, as places near the convention center tend to book up fast!