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.

This is the first time PBS has produced a film festival exclusively for online content and with a focus on independent films. Of the 20 films selected, four are films funded by ITVS and three have been previously released online. They are: Bullet Proof Vest by May Lin Au Yong (Grand Jury Prize Winner of the Independent Lens Online Film Festival), Play by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman, Sunshine: Single Dads by Karen Skloss; and Women and Girls Lead: Meet Beverly by Carl and Betsy Crum.

The IDA Awards celebrate outstanding achievements in documentary filmmaking and three ITVS funded films received nominations for the 2011 Awards. All three nominees were originally broadcast on the award-winning PBS series POV.  See the entire list of ITVS nominees after the jump:

Best Feature Award Nomination
Better This World by Katie Galloway & Kelly Duane de la Vega

IDA Humanitas Award Nomination
The Learning by Ramona S. Diaz

ABC News Videosource Award Nomination
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
By Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith

Additionally, Danfung Dennis, the director of the acclaimed Hell and Back Again (coming to Independent Lens in Spring 2012) will receive the Jacqueline Donnet Award, which recognizes filmmakers who have made a significant impact in documentary film.

And POV and American Experience  both received nominations for Best Continuing Series.

Congratulations to all the nominees!

For the entire list of the 2011 IDA Award nominees, click here >>

ITVS nearly got a clean sweep in the Best Documentary category of the IFP Gotham Awards with ITVS films receiving four out of the five nominations.  Check out the list of ITVS Best Documentary nominees along with their trailers after the jump >>

Better This World 
By Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega
Aired on POV this past September
Two childhood friends from Midland, Texas fall under the sway of a charismatic revolutionary who leads them down a path that changes their lives forever.

The Woodmans
By C. Scott Willis
Airing on Independent Lens on December 22, 2011 (check local listings)
The Woodmans is an inspiring portrait of one family’s fall and redemption in the often brutal world of art.

Hell and Back Again
by Danfung Dennis
Coming to Independent Lens in Spring 2012
What does it mean to lead men in war? What does it mean to come home — injured physically and psychologically — and build a life anew?

The Interrupters
By Steve James
Coming to PBS
A look at a group of men and women — most of them former gang leaders and ex-cons — that are trying to “interrupt” shootings and protect their communities from the violence they once employed.

The Women & Girls Matter event will include a day of panels and workshops presented by Media That Matters. The summit is designed to look at the obstacles and opportunities for women and girls in filmmaking and new media, highlighting the values women bring to their work, and to open up a dialogue for ways to create new spaces for female voices in the field.

The day focuses on the needs of women in film and will conclude with concrete actions for participants to take in order to help bring the voices of women and girls out of the margins and into the mainstream.

Women & Girls Matter takes place on October 29 in New York City. For more information, click here >>

You can register for the event online at womenandgirlsmatter.eventbrite.com >>

 Join public media’s Women and Girls Lead campaign on Facebook

JoEllen Marsh is 20 years old, and has never met her father. As she goes in search of her paternity, her path to Donor 150 becomes an exploration into identity and the complex permutations of family. Her journey raises questions about what makes us who we are, what makes a family, and what the brave new world of fertility technology means for our assumptions about both.

A documentary about identity, genetic inheritance and the family of the future, Donor Unknown airs October 20 on PBS (check local listings).

In anticipation of the broadcast, we will be holding a live chat with filmmaker Jerry Rothwell and a panel of experts to discuss what it is like to be a child of an anonymous donor, what it’s like to parent donor-conceived children, and the state of the assisted fertility industry.  Join the discussion live on BTB and the Independent Lens blog on October 20th starting at at 10AM PT / 1PM ET.

Watch the  trailer below…

To bring closure to the inaugural ITVS Indies Showcase festival which just wrapped up, viewers were asked to select a favorite film for the always-coveted Audience Award. Well, the votes have been tallied and the Indies Showcase Audience Award winner is A Panther in Africa.

The documentary by filmmaker Aaron Matthews, which originally aired on POV, tells the story of  Pete O’Neal, a Black Panther living in exile in Tanzania who commits his life to activism and community service.

Congratulations to the filmmaker and thanks to everyone who voted!

Click her to watch a trailer >>

Daddy & Papa explores the personal, cultural, and political impact of gay men who are making a decision that is at once traditional and revolutionary: to raise children themselves. Taking us inside four gay male families, Daddy & Papa traces the day-to-day challenges and the larger, critical issues that inevitably intersect their private lives – the ambiguous place of interracial families in America, the wonder and precariousness of surrogacy and adoption, the complexities of marriage and divorce within the gay community, and the legality of their own parenthood.

Watch Daddy & Papa now on ITVS’s Indies Showcase >>

Still Life with Animated Dogs traces Paul Fierlinger’s tumultuous life from Stalinist Czechoslovakia to the United States as seen through his relationships with his dogs. It is Fierlinger’s loyalty and caring for his dogs that sustains him even in an atmosphere of oppression and suspicion. Each dog serves as a marker of its master’s personal growth from a misanthrope to an artist who appreciates the divine powers of nature.

Watch Still Life with Animated Dogs now on ITVS’s Indies Showcase >>

An ethnically diverse group of four working class girls strut, flirt, and testify in this vibrant, affecting portrait of teenage girls’ experiences of sexuality. Filmed in South Philadelphia and following its subjects from the ages of 14 to 18, Girls Like Us reveals the conflicts of growing up female by examining the impact of class, sexism, and violence on the dreams and expectations of young girls.

Watch Girls Like Us now on Indies Showcase >>