Where Soldiers Come From

A four-year journey that takes teenagers from rural northern Michigan to the battlefields of Afghanistan and back, Where Soldiers Come From follows five high school friends who join the National Guard to pay for college. The film is an intimate look at the young men who fight America’s wars. Check out the film’s trailer after the jump.

Additional honors went to filmmaker Danfung Dennis (Hell and Back Again), who received the Jacqueline Donnet Award, which recognizes filmmakers who have made a significant impact at the beginning of his or her career in documentary film. See the complete list of winners here.

Best Music
Better This World by filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega; and by composer Paul Brill

Jacqueline Donnet Award
Danfung Dennis (Hell and Back Again)
*** premiering this season on Independent Lens

Best Continuing Series
POV by Executive Producer Simon Kilmurry

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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 >>

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 >>

The Learning is the story of four Filipino women who are recruited to teach in Baltimore city public schools. With their increased salaries, they hope to transform their families’ lives back in their impoverished country. But the women also bring idealistic visions of the teacher’s craft and of life in America, which soon collide with Baltimore’s tough realities.

Friday’s live event is open to the public, and participants are encouraged to log on and ask questions.

ITVS-funded filmmakers Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman’s documentary If a Tree Falls will air Tuesday, September 13 on POV.  The film offers a behind-the-curtain look at the Earth Liberation Front, the radical environmental organization that the FBI calls the “number one domestic terrorism threat” in America. Check out the trailer after the jump…

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 >>

The Oath is the story of Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard, and Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay Prison and the first man to face the controversial military tribunals.

Filmed in Yemen, The Oath is the second installment in a trilogy about America post 9/11.  The first film, My Country, My Country, documented the U.S. occupation of Iraq from the perspective of an Iraqi family. The third film will focus on domestic surveillance.

Check out the trailer for The Oath below and be sure to watch Tuesday, August 16 on POV.

The Oath is also one of the 20 documentaries selected as part of ITVS’s Indies Showcase and will stream free on that site from September 11-13.

The film follows Daniel Ellsberg, a leading Vietnam War strategist, who concluded in 1971 that America’s role in the war was based on decades of lies. He leaked 7,000 pages of top-secret documents to The New York Times, a daring act of conscience that led directly to Watergate, President Nixon’s resignation, and the end of the Vietnam War.

Last month, P.O.V. honored the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers with an encore broadcast of the documentary. Enjoy the trailer below…

The media industry is still largely a man’s world. In commercial film, only 7 percent of directors, 13 percent of writers, and 20 percent of producers are female. How will the next generation of women media-makers confront that reality? ITVS, POV, the Bay Area Video Coalition, and Youth Radio will partner to present a live chat on Monday, July 11 at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET with talented young women from around the country who have won acclaim in the youth media world and beyond. The conversation will be moderated by independent producer Jen Gilomen (co-director of Deep Down).

This is the first in a regular series of online conversations about critical issues facing women and girls today, as part of the Women and Girls Lead public media initiative.

Participants:

Jen Gilomen (moderator): Jen Gilomen is a documentary filmmaker and D.P., as well as director of public media strategies at the Bay Area Video Coalition, where she directs the public-access television station and works in collaboration with public-media entities, community organizations, and producers to develop innovative social media programs and initiatives. She co-directed the Independent Lens film, Deep Down, about a community in rural Kentucky embroiled in a contentious battle over energy, and torn between the wealth and environmental destruction mountaintop-removal mining represents.

Denise Tejada (Youth Radio): Denise Tejada is a graduate of Youth Radio’s class of 2003. She has moved from student to peer teacher to news department assistant producer. Her video feature, Mission District Diversity, won the My City Now Future Filmmaker Contest as part of KQED’s Education Network. In 2009 Tejada received the Gracie Award for Outstanding Reporter/Correspondent. Tejada is part of the Youth Radio team recently recognized with a Peabody and Murrow Award for the two-part investigation, Trafficked, on child sex trafficking in Oakland, California. Tejada is currently attending Berkeley City College in Berkeley, CA.

Lauren Lindberg (Bay Area Video Coalition’s Factory Youth Program): Laura Lindberg is an 18-year old documentary filmmaker, whose films have screened in 17 national and international film festivals this year, including the San Francisco Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, Paley Docujam, Cineyouth film festival, NFFTY, as well as an exhibition at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. Her awards include: Best Editing, Best Documentary, Best Youth Film, and Audience Choice Award. Lauren was recently chosen as one of five teens, out of 35,000 from across the country, as a Seventeen Magazine “Pretty Amazing” Teen. Lauren will attend Chapman University in Orange, CA in the fall, and will study documentary film. Her dream is to start a production company called “Voices to be Heard,” in which she tells the stories of those who are without a voice to tell their own. Lauren recently won the Jefferson Award from CBS San Francisco for her outstanding public service work. Find a sample of Lauren’s work here.

Zoe Salnave (Bay Area Video Coalition’s Factory Youth Program): Zoe is a filmmaker in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has produced multiple films, including Come to the Table about Alice Waters’s edible schoolyard. Her films have been accepted at film festivals such as the San Francisco International, Seattle International, National Film Festival for Talented Youth, Chicago International (Cineyouth), San Joaquin Teen Truth Film Festival, Spotlight FilmFest, Project YouthView in Alameda, Albany FilmFest, and she also had Come to the Table screened privately at the White House for the Obama family and was most recently requested by the New York International Film Festival. She will be studying film and journalism at Mills College in Fall 2011. Find a sample of Zoe’s work here.

Negesti Cantave (Project VoiceScape, POV): Negesti made Bed-Stuy: Do or Buy?, a piece examining gentrification in the Brooklyn neighborhood where she was raised. She plans to continue documentary filmmaking as her career.  She went to City-As-School in Brooklyn and attends Medgar Evers College. Find a sample of Zoe’s work here.

Morgan Wilcock (Project VoiceScape, POV): Morgan Wilcock is an aspiring young documentary filmmaker from Minneapolis.  She has enjoyed creating comedy digital shorts from a young age.  She is currently working on her premiere documentary, “This Gay and Age,” in conjunction with Project VoiceScape. Find a sample of Morgan’s work here.

About ITVS and Women and Girls Lead:

Women and girls everywhere are stepping into leadership roles, working to improve their communities, and innovating in science, the arts, business, and governance. Yet there is still much to do to deliver on the promise of equal access, freedom, and opportunity for women and girls worldwide. Women and Girls Lead is a strategic media initiative to support and sustain a growing movement to empower them, their communities, and future generations. Learn More about the initiative here.

About POV‘s Project VoiceScape:

The Adobe and PBS Foundations, together with the PBS series POV, are pleased to announce that 15 projects by 22 teen filmmakers will receive grants from Project VoiceScape, a collaboration between the Adobe Foundation’s global signature philanthropy program Adobe Youth Voices and POV, public television’s longest-running showcase for independent nonfiction films.

Learn more about about BAVC and The Factory Youth Program here.

Learn more about Youth Radio here.