Watch POV Season 25 Preview on PBS. See more from POV.

POV launches its 25th season on Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 10 PM (check local listings) with award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Fox’s My Reincarnation, the story of a father’s spiritual persistence and a son’s spiritual awakening. The regular season runs through Thursday, Oct. 18 and continues with two special presentations in the fall and winter.

Click here to see the full broadcast schedule.

Are you obsessed with GIFs yet? If you’re not, now’s the time to start. PBS Off Book produced an excellent primer into the art of the moving still image, known as the Graphic Interchange Format, from its uncool, corporate beginnings in the 1990s to its current heyday.

Here’s a chuckle-worthy photo of Bill Murray looking twee against a wall of paparazzi at the Cannes Film Festival 2012. The festival featured the premiere of Wes Anderson’s latest whimsical confection, Moonrise Kingdom, in which Murray stars.

Also at Cannes, Saudi Arabia experienced a lot of firsts. The country’s first female director, Haiffa al Mansour, brought Wadjda, the first film ever shot in Saudi Arabia, to the festival. The coming-of-age drama follows an 11-year-old girl in the outskirts of Riyadh.

If you’re looking for transmedia storytelling inspiration, check out the website yyyhhhqqq.com (for the URL name if nothing else).

Courtesy of the POV blog, here are eight documentaries that tell stories unfolding over long periods, sometimes decades, and how they manage to transcend time. The eighth installment in the Up documentary series, 56 Up, broadcasts in the UK this month, almost 50 years after the first film premiered.

Irreverent filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait, director of Sleeping Dogs Lie and Zed in Police Academy, tells Vice magazine why distancing himself from mainstream Hollywood was the best decision he made.

Things got meta in the documentary world this week. Filmmakers Sarah Klein and Tom Mason made a five-minute short about documentary legend Ken Burns. The insightful video, Ken Burns: On Story, includes several game-changing tips on storytelling, such as 1 + 1 = 3. Burns explains: “The things that matter most to us, some people call it love, some people call it God, some people call it reason, is that other thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that’s the three.”

See more Indies Roundup’s from the archives.

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)

Get your creativity on! Longshot Radio and Radiolab talked about creativity, revision, and failure at the 99% Conference in New York City last week. For your listening pleasure, they compiled their editors’ picks of podcasts from the event.

Behold the TV of the future: using an iPad as a remote, you can control the features that appear on your screen and the overall size, which can stretch the length of your living room wall. Wired claims this is just “what the TV industry needs to stay relevant.”

“I want a man like Putin, who doesn’t drink. I want a man like Putin, who won’t make me sad.” These are the actual lyrics to a Russian pop song. This gem is explained in the new PBS show SOUND TRACKS that will broadcast in Fall 2012. Until then, you can watch their series on the web to learn the political and cultural stories behind music around the world.

Have a short film but don’t know where to submit it? Raindance compiled a list of the top 100 short film festivals worldwide.

After Charlotte Cook stepped up as Director of Programming for the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, she was taken aback when a friend called it “niche cinema.” Cook describes her response and her experience programming Hot Docs in Indiewire: “I cannot comprehend the notion that documentary could ever be thought of as niche or a genre. Documentary is everything.”

This should be interesting. The ironic international magazine Vice is pairing up with HBO to start its own news show. If nothing else, watch to find out if it’s possible to report from a war zone in skinny jeans.

We all know David Lynch is the King of Strange. In 1995, he was also given a strange assignment: Lynch and 40 other filmmakers had the chance to use the first movie camera, the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe, with only a 52-second roll of film. See the results of Lynch’s project in Open Culture.

See more Indies Roundup’s from the archives.

Sadly, film festivals are wrapping up this week. Hot Docs in Toronto, the largest North American documentary festival, closes this weekend. The event brimmed with films about edgy artists, such as Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.

At Hot Docs today, filmmakers are protesting the Canadian government’s cuts to CBC, NBF, and Telefilm Canada. The industry has lost 1,500 full-time documentary jobs in the past two years, according to the Documentary Organization of Canada. (via Realscreen)

To succeed as a documentary filmmaker in such dire economic times, read advice from first-time filmmakers who are screening their work at Hot Docs.

For a more personal touch, check out director Neil Drumming’s dispatches for The Atlantic as he tackles his first feature film. The screenwriter didn’t want to direct, but he eventually forced himself to take the plunge: “The good news was that once I decided to direct the film myself, I found that other people—smart, talented, creative people—were drawn to my commitment.”

The San Francisco International Film Festival drew to an end last night. One of the last events, Sam Green’s premiere of “The Love Song of Buckminster Fuller,” transformed a documentary screening into performance art. Green narrated the film and indie pop band Yo La Tengo accompanied his cinematic ode to the groundbreaking sustainable architect. This type of live performance might revitalize experimental documentaries, according to Indiewire.

Jennifer Baichwal didn’t expect to become a documentary filmmaker. She was on her way to becoming a professor, but rerouted to use her research chops in the doc world. Her academic background helps her film without a script: “You can’t make reality conform to your predetermined idea of what should happen,” Baichwal told Zeitgeist Films.  “Documentary really is about being in the moment and figuring out what’s going on and reacting to what’s going on.”

Need advice for capturing landscapes on your shoot? Here are simple tips from National Geographic nature photographers.

See more Indies Roundup’s from the archives.

Good news continues to pour in from the passage of the JOBS Act. For example, indie filmmakers could raise up to one million dollars. Cue the Dr. Evil face.

Can the art-form of cinéma vérité and Werner Herzog benefit from the input of technologists? MIT Open Documentary Lab thinks so. “There’s this perception that documentary is this staid medium,” Sarah Wolozin, director of the new Open Documentary Lab, told Nieman Journalism Lab. “It’s not. It is this place of innovation. And I think a lot of documentary filmmakers have lost their connection to that history.”

If you’re an emerging filmmaker, score new cameras and lenses. Grantees will talk about Panavision’s New Filmmaker Program in New York this afternoon.

Has TV surpassed film as the leading visual medium of our pop culture? The argument rages on at Indiewire.

Alfred Hitchcock has been proposed for Britain’s national curriculum. Here are five lessons school children will learn from the suspenseful director, according to The Guardian. Vertigo, for example, “tells you all you need to know about romantic obsession.”

Missing the San Francisco International Film Festival? Catch up on comments from Jonathan Lethem, who delivered the “State of the Cinema” address, and Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin, who directed the understated comedy The Band’s Visit and his latest, The Exchange.

“Come to Kazakhstan, it’s nice!” That’s Borat’s movie tagline. Once banned in its setting of Kazakhstan, the film started a tourism boom in the beleaguered former Soviet republic. Since it premiered in 2006, tourist visas applications have increased tenfold, said Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov.

See more Indies Roundup’s from the archives.

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:

Since POV went on the air in 1988, it has championed the documentary art form, offering filmmakers a venue to take creative risks. It’s where you’ve seen work from documentary greats including Errol Morris, Jonathan Demme, Albert and David Maysles, Michael Moore, Freida Lee Mock, and Frederick Wiseman.

This year’s films reveal humanity’s faith, courage, and resilience. Remarkable individuals challenge authority and their own limitations to indict a dictator, keep investigative journalism alive, rebuild after Katrina, and find strength in love.

Explore the films and the 2012 broadcast schedule here.

ITVS has partnered with Mozilla, the Tribeca Film Institute, BAVC, and the Center for Social Media to create the Living Docs Project — a new film community inspired by our original collaboration with Mozilla last October.

Launching Monday, the Living Docs Project brings together documentary filmmakers, developers, funders, and the audience to make the case for a new kind of storytelling on the web.

The web has given documentary filmmakers a powerful mechanism to distribute their films, but we have only scratched the surface of how it can change storytelling.  The Living Docs Project sees the web as a canvas on which new types of documentaries can be told.

Last year’s ITVS/Mozilla Hackathon brought together a stellar group of creatives, including award-winning filmmakers like Steve James, Renee Tajima-Pena, and Bonni Cohen, and a crack squad of Popcorn.js coders. The teams created great projects over two days. We were even able to provide follow-on funding to The Interrupters team who, along with some co-funding from our friends at Tribeca Film Institute, already developed their prototype into the Digital Shrines feature on their interactive website.

The Living Docs Project website is an extension of the goals we had for the hackathon: building community and capacity, expanding the funding available for innovative storytelling, and breaking down the traditional barriers between filmmakers and developers.

The more we collaborate and share, the stronger we all become.

As storytelling enters the 21st Century, we are inspired by Mozilla’s open-source ethos of collaboration, constant learning, and iteration. These new ways of working require new skills, new teams, and new aesthetics.

The Living Docs Project is going to help support this new form of storytelling by hosting Hack Days; highlighting projects that we love and support; documenting best practices and sharing lessons learned; sharing code; and providing funding for the creation of web-native documentaries.

Bookmark the Living Docs Project website, and stay tuned to BTB for updates.

The New York Times: Dot Earth Blog: If a Tree Falls, Can it when an Oscar?
…an extraordinary documentary by the brilliant young filmmakers Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman that explores the prosecution of members of the Earth Liberation Front for a series of costly arson fires.

The New York Times: Year-End Lists: Top Ten Movies of 2011
David Weissman’s documentary We Were Here was among the top films (fiction & documentary) selected by Stephen Holden.

Womens eNews: Daughters of Imprisoned Moms Regroup for a Sequel
Troop 1500, rebroadcasting tonight on PBS’s Independent Lens, is about Girl Scouts who trek together to visit mothers behind bars. Director Ellen Spiro talks here about the reunion sequel she is making with the daughters, five years later.

Realscreen.com: PBS unveils 2012 Black History Month line-up
U.S. public broadcaster PBS has unveiled the programming for Black History Month in February, including a number of specials and feature docs looking at a variety of historical events from the post-Emancipation era to the rise of the Black Power movement.

Visit our pressroom to find additional coverage of ITVS programs >>