Based on the bestselling book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky will premiere as a special presentation on Independent Lens in October 2012. The project is a cornerstone of the Women and Girls Lead campaign and was on display at last week’s PBS Annual Meeting in Denver.

Just back from the PBS annual meeting in Denver and was absolutely thrilled by the response from stations to the upcoming Half the Sky series, which will air on October 1 and 2 as a special presentation of Independent Lens.

This project has been several years in the making, taking up the ambitious work of New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn who wrote Half the Sky to highlight the challenges that women and girls are facing worldwide — issues like trafficking, maternal health, female genital mutilation, and gender based violence.

It’s hard stuff, but the approach of both Nick and Sheryl — and by the incredible filmmakers who have taken this book and turned it into a transmedia project — have tapped into the message that ‘women are not the problem, they’re the solution.’

Watch Women Are Not the Problem, They Are the Solution on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

The luncheon event to roll out Half the Sky was powerful in itself, with remarks from the CEOs of CPB (Patricia Harrison), PBS (Paula Kerger), and ITVS (Sally Jo Fifer), along with Nick and Sheryl, Meg Ryan and Olivia Wilde — two of the six celebrity advocates who traveled with this project, and two incredible women from the film, Rebecca and Jane, who live in Kenya and shared their personal stories. Plus, filmmakers Maro Chermayeff, Jamie Gordon, Mikaela Beardsley, and Mira Chang were also on hand.

If the response from the conference is any indicator, Half the Sky will have a big impact on audiences when it airs this fall. Stay tuned!

Read another ringing endorsement of Half the Sky and its impact at the PBS Annual Meeting from Current

Find out more about ITVS’s Women and Girls Lead campaign

I’m pleased to report that the Independent Strategy Task Force has emerged from months of conversation to deliver a new 10 p.m. primetime slot on Monday nights for Independent Lens and POV.  This is great news for our series filmmakers and audiences, but more importantly it affirms the partnership and mission that independents and public broadcasting steward together: amplifying diverse voices to strengthen our democracy.

We are grateful to every filmmaker, station, and viewer who spoke up to tell us why the two series needed a home on the PBS core schedule. And we are grateful to PBS for working hard with us to make it possible and to develop a new strategy for more independent work to reach Americans through a broadcast and online festival that will promote POV and Independent Lens.

While significant work lies ahead to regain station carriage, we look forward to working hard to steer old and new audiences to Monday nights. And we’ll need your help.

Why is the partnership between public broadcasting and independents so important?

In concept and in practice a public broadcast — with the full surround of press, festivals, transmedia strategies, and NGO and CBO partners that bring together communities to solve problems — will continue to stand as a powerful mechanism to focus, connect, and educate society. Will the value of a solo broadcast erode as viewers scatter to second screens? Certainly. Will a primetime slot mean as much in 10 years as it does today? Probably not — but it is essential now.

We live in time when we must toggle between the present and the future. We need conventional and unconventional strategies to compete amid the asymmetry of monopolized media. We need every platform to get across our messages. And in this exalted Internet explosion, we need storytellers who create long and short-form documentaries and transmedia experiences that connect the dots and contextualize our world.

The bigger question is, do independents even need public institutions like public television and ITVS? The answer is yes, always, because neither the Internet nor commercial broadcast marketplaces is accountable to citizens. Private companies that sink or swim according to shareholder value can sometimes balance equally the business of making money and serving the public, but the common good is the first-order mission of public broadcasting. And when it isn’t, we stand to be corrected. You have, and we are the better for it. Starting in October, come watch Independent Lens at 10 p.m. on Monday nights and bring your friends.

Read about the announcement in Wednesday’s New York Times

Read more on the announcement from POV

The National Endowment for the Arts has selected two ITVS interactive projects to receive funding through its Arts in Media Grants.

This week, the National Endowment for the Arts announced projects selected for funding through its Arts in Media Grants Program. We’re proud to announce that two interactive projects, funded through ITVS’s Project 360 Initiative, have garnered NEA support.

Power Poetry, inspired by the film To Be Heard by Roland Leigardi-Laura, the world’s first mobile poetry community for youth, encourages youth to write poems and take action through text and micropoems. Our Mother Tongues, inspired by the film We Still Live Here by Anne Makepeace, provides an interactive journey through Native American languages and the burgeoning movement among American Indians to save them.

We’re thrilled that these innovative projects and the talented, independent makers responsible for them will receive additional support from the NEA. We also congratulate many of our colleagues in the field. See the full list of grantees here.

‘Tis the season for film festivals: Both the Tribeca Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival kicked off this week.

Read an enlightening interview of three Tribeca staffers to get a sense of how they winnowed down their film festival choices. “We don’t respect the idea of, ‘I like this, I don’t like this,’” Genna Terranova, director of programming, told The New York Times. “You have to explain why, almost as if you’re looking at it as an academic evaluation. But at the same time, you have to add that human observation: Were you moved? Were you scared?”

Frédéric Boyer, artistic director at Tribeca, was also interviewed by The Awl. The man watches movies like no other: “It was impossible to have children or any love affair because my priority was to watch films,” Boyer said about his early career. “It was a wonderful period because it was a crazy period. I was watching five, six, seven films each day and reading books about cinema. Fortunately, I escaped from this beautiful prison because of music, women, wine, food, life.”

Are you wondering how the JOBS Act might affect you as a filmmaker? This handy guide from Filmmaker Magazine explains how the act will transform indie film funding.

In case you missed it, filmmaker Sharon Shattuck published a lovely Op-Doc in The New York Times about her transgender father changing his name to Trisha in a Northern Michigan small town.

This Twitter chat, hosted by our friends at POV, could prove very helpful: Producer Yance Ford will discuss how to get your film on public television Wednesday April 25 at 7 p.m. eastern time.

Film title sequences require artistry and a great deal of effort from producers, animators, and typographers, as shown in this fascinating PBS Off Book video.

When Philip K. Dick saw a TV segment about Blade Runner, the upcoming film adaptation of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, he knew it would shape history: “The impact of BLADE RUNNER is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people — and, I believe, on science fiction as a field.” (via The Rumpus)

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.

Happy poetry month! Read about the “greatest poetry documentary of all time,” according to the Poetry Foundation: Ron Mann’s 1982 Poetry in Motion.

A new interactive documentary called Barcode is a carnival funhouse of films. Thirty filmmakers produced 100 docs about the objects that surround us, from brooms to lipstick. My favorite short follows subway riders engrossed in books with a voiceover of the lines they’re reading.

YouTube added a pay-per-view option for live streaming of events, which adds another funding platform to your arsenal.

The nominees for the Webby Awards were announced this week, including an entire category of Online Video/Film. Check out IDEO’s The Future of the Book, a video nominated in the Experimental & Weird category.

An East German guard kissed a woman on study abroad through the Berlin Wall, as shown in this photograph originally posted to Reddit.

If you’re stumped about what release to watch this weekend, Indiewire reviewed twelve new indie films.

In 1946, two Columbia University anthropologists dismissed racism in a scientific pamphlet distributed to U.S. troops, and it was eventually adapted into a quirky animation called The Brotherhood of Man. Enjoy!

This year’s selections provide extraordinary access and insight into the daily lives and struggles of people around the world, from military veterans threatened with deportation in the U.S. to women’s human rights struggles in Nigeria.

The productions were selected through a competitive application process, which resulted in 138 submissions.

Check out the complete list of funded projects after the jump >>

American Exile - Carleen Hsu

The Bill - Ramona Diaz

In the Shadow of the Hills - Bao Nguyen

Like a Rolling Stone - Suzanne Joe Kai

My Wave, My Life - Kimberlee Bassford

The Silence of Others - Almudena Carracedo

Siquerios: Walls of Passion - Lorena Manriquez

Reproductive Choice: Revisiting “La Operación” - Sabrina Avilés

Untitled - Gita Saedi Kiely

Warrior Women - Christina D. King

We Respectfully Disagree - Salem Mekuria

For more information on the Diversity Development Fund, please click here.

Look, up in the sky! Here comes trouble. When a movie character gawks into the ether, you know something bad is on its way. If you want to avoid this cliche, or simply have a Friday laugh, watch this montage from Devour. (via Open Culture)

If you’re at a loss of what to watch this weekend, check out this list of documentaries opening in April.

Stanley Kubrick’s first three films were short documentaries. “It was invaluable experience,” he said, “because being forced to do everything myself, I gained a sound and comprehensive grasp of all the technical aspects of filmmaking.” His three shorts followed a middleweight boxer, the Seafarers International Union, and a New Mexico reverend.

Are you afraid of marketing your documentary on social media? Or do you lack the time for Twitter? You can’t afford to feel that way any longer, says Sheri Candler at Tribeca Film Institute.

How do you know if an independent film has fared well in box offices? Find out different ways to measure engagement from Indiewire.

This is so wonderful. Argentinian filmmaker Juan Pablo Zaramella spent two years making this stop-motion short film, Luminaris. With charming cinematography, classic Buenos Aires cityscapes, and sparkling humor, this six-minute video made it onto the 2011 Oscar shortlist for Best Animated Film with good reason.

Musa Syeed is one of the hottest up and coming filmmaking talents in the U.S. His work includes documentaries such as A Son’s Sacrifice, Bronx Princess, and a narrative feature, Valley of Saints — which is currently on the festival circuit. He has also been experimenting with new, interactive forms of storytelling, and we asked him to write about his experiences for BTB.

For most of my life, I’ve been something of a technophobe. Maybe it was that I watched The Terminator at too young an age or perhaps it was my father’s insistence on the superiority of the microwave, but either way, an epic struggle with artificial intelligence and subsequent robot armageddon has long seemed to me not only possible but imminent.

And I felt that as a filmmaker, I had reason to fear technological advancements in the field. New media/interactive/transmedia was making a medium I revered as a child seemingly obsolete, banishing motion pictures from the majestic big screen to pathetic, paltry iPhones.

Despite this fear and hatred, I became pretty engrossed in my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Whether I liked it or not, these new media platforms were built to be engaging, and I was engaged. And here is where I realized what new media tools offered me as a filmmaker: they could fill my outreach gap. Traditional outreach for a film usually means community screenings and discussions. While those screenings were a good way to see the film’s impact on the ground, they’re not always creatively fulfilling or particularly sustainable. By the time I got to the outreach stage of a film, I’d usually rather just work on my next film. This was disappointing, since I got into filmmaking for its potential for social change.

So when I had the opportunity to participate in BAVC’s Producers Institute for New Media Technologies, an institute to help filmmakers create new media outreach projects around their social issue films, I thought I’d give it a try. I went to the institute with my first feature film, Valley of Saints, a gentle romance set against the backdrop of environmental devastation in war-torn Kashmir. While the film can raise awareness internationally about the problems facing Kashmir’s environment, I realized it can do little on its own to make change where it’s needed.

Considering we had a specific problem (environmental devastation) and an aware population (Kashmiri youth) who either didn’t know what to do or felt they couldn’t do anything about it, we knew the solution lay in bridging that gap. With my producer Nicholas Bruckman and designers Noah Keating and Tony Walsh, we designed the social game Kashmir is Beautiful, using Facebook as a platform. Facebook is hugely popular in Kashmir, and many youth have turned to the social network when physical meetings and mobility are often interrupted by strikes and curfews.

While there is some initial virtual gameplay, the game’s real-life missions are what make it unique. Players are given challenges to go away from their computers and document nature or their own green actions with their phones. They then come back to the game to share their photos. They only progress in the game once their photos have been viewed and verified by other users. Ultimately, the game is meant to foster a sense of personal responsibility and a community of environmental stewardship.

Shortly after the institute, I started working on a documentary about the 30 Mosques project with co-director Omar Mullick. My friends Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq roadtripped to 30 mosques in 30 states in 30 days, blogging all the way. The unique window they created into the community gained a lot of attention, and we literally had a backseat view of their journey. After the road trip, we were invited to the ITVS/Mozilla Living Docs Hackathon. An intense two-day marathon, the Hackathon paired filmmakers with coders to create dynamic, interactive, immersive online documentary experiences using Mozilla’s Popcorn.js framework.

Initially we thought to integrate the film and the blog online, but we realized that we would be doing a disservice to the film and the blog. They weren’t made to go together, and doing so would be clunky and unnatural. Instead, we looked at the project’s strengths and needs to decide how to best use the technology. In terms of strengths, the 30 Mosques project has an incredibly engaged community of readers and has inspired many spinoffs throughout the world. In terms of needs, readers want a greater diversity of perspectives on the community aside from 30 Mosque’s two South Asian male creators — in particular there is a demand for the voices of Muslim women.

So, we decided to create a crowdsourced, dynamic storytelling platform that would put the authorship in the hands of the community for the next stage of the 30 Mosques project. We were inspired by the MadLibs game, where one player asks another for specific words to fill in the blanks of a pre-scripted story, collaboratively creating a narrative with unexpected results. In this case, we will provide a challenge or prompt to our users, for example “What is it like the last hour before you break fast in Ramadan?”

Users then create videos of their answers to the challenge, and when uploading to the site, they will be asked to tag the video with a specific set of metadata (keywords, time of day, location, etc). The metadata tags of their video will then fill in the blanks of a timeline, which includes our scripted voiceover to tie the user content into a cohesive narrative around the challenge. The timelines will evolve as new content became available, and users can also choose different timeline views — a timeline of the most shared videos, a geographically-specific timeline, etc. As filmmakers and bloggers, handing authorship over to the audience isn’t actually scary. It’s actually quite liberating and exciting.

So while I’m still just getting my feet wet in the interactive realm, I’m beginning to see it as an essential part of making a traditional film. As much as I embrace these nonlinear forms of storytelling, I take comfort in knowing the story of storytelling is also not linear. Traditional cinema will always be close to my heart. Not even the robots can take that from me.

Take a look at Musa Syeed’s slides from his presentation at the SFIAAF:

The director of the classic Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder, gave Cameron Crowe some thoughtful filmmaking advice in the 1990s. Though Wilder was talking about screenwriting, his list applies to documentary filmmaking as well, including such gems as “Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.”

You probably know that recently released documentaries are being taught in classrooms today. But did you know that a free school essay for The Interrupters is already available online? (via Kartemquin)

This week, Realscreen published their picks for the top 100 nonfiction production companies worldwide.

Can a hackathon help out storytellers? On April 28 in New York, the transmedia nonprofit StoryCode is hosting the first story-hack. Writers, filmmakers, designers, students, and coders are invited to participate in the weekend-long event.

Kickstarter was the source of some heat Thursday when Gizmodo said they were done with the crowd-funding platform. Their main complaint was not over film fundraising, but half-baked gadgets.

If you’re feeling blocked creatively, don’t fret. Frustration and even surrender are important parts of the creative process, according to Jonah Lehrer’s latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works.

On a similar note, don’t be too ashamed of your failures. Photographers revealed their worst shots — and why they considered them to be rubbish — in The Guardian.

See more Indies Roundup’s from the archives.