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John Anderson, writing in the New York Times, says some people like Michael Moore, some despise him. We already knew that. He continues, “The Toronto-based documentary filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk started out in the first camp. But during the course of making an unauthorized film about Mr. Moore they wound up somewhere in […]

Time magazine’s Carolina A. Miranda interviews D.A. Pennebaker “about the Dylan conversation he wished he could have filmed and how the movie almost didn’t get released.” Prurient tease: Porn theaters played a big role in breaking out two of his films.
The article’s last question and answer:
Q: What are your home movies like?
A: I think of […]

Yesterday the Stanford Law School Fair Use Project, insurance company Media/Professional, and attorney Michael Donaldson announced a program that will aid filmmakers who want to use copyrighted material in their films under the currently-hazy (and usually uninsurable) concept of fair-use. Briefly, the idea behind fair-use is that copyrighted material can be used without compensation to […]

Andrew O’Hehir discusses the Oscar-nominated documentary and foreign-language films, and interviews some of the directors, in this article in Salon. O’Hehir also links to his article last year where he discusses the categories’ “checkered, semi-glorious history.” The current article gives a synopsis of each nominated film, and he speaks with Amy Berg (Deliver Us From […]

After a Missula, Montana screening of The Tea Film (working title), Les Blank asked the audience, “What do you think the title should be?” Seonaid B. Campbell writes in New West, “Audience members, giddy at being queried by the filmmaker, shouted out suggestions like “Tao of Tea” and “Steeped in Tradition,” but I preferred […]

Rob Curley and his teams have created several great websites for local news organizations. Their work at the Lawrence Journal World website and at Studio 55 in Naples Florida was useful, innovative, and relentlessly local. Now Curley’s working with some currently-staid sites with more-than-local reach.
onBeing, his first project as VP of product development for Washingtonpost.Newsweek […]

An article in Broadcasting & Cable (B&C) discusses controversy about the funding of FAT: What No One Is Telling You, an upcoming PBS doc about obesity. The doc was produced by Twin Cities Public Television and partially funded by drug maker GlaxoSmithKline. It’s scheduled to air in April.
B&C quotes a letter from Jeff Chester of […]

Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us is an optimistic explanation of how Web 2.0 works and how it is changing the world. Even if you don’t fully buy the message, the 4:30 video by Mike Wesch remains a cool and even moving combination of text, animation, and screenshots.
You can see The Machine is Us/ing […]

To celebrate its tenth anniversary, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival invited ten filmmakers “to select a documentary that has spoken to her or him during this time about our culture and the art and impact of documentary filmmaking.” The filmmakers are St. Clair Bourne, Charles Burnett, Ariel Dorfman, Cara Mertes, Walter Mosley, Michael Moore, Mira […]

The South by Southwest Film Festival announced it 2007 feature film lineup. Docs include 638 Ways to Kill Castro by Dollan Cannell (”examines the incredible and controversial story of 638 alleged plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro”), Doubletime by Stephanie Johnes (”reveals the divided world of competitive jump roping”), and of course some docs […]

Aaron Ernst taped a recent talk by Albert Maysles that “focused on an overview of his works and style.” Ernst embedded a 55-minute Google-Video version of the talk on his blog.

A web-only Newsweek article by Daren Briscoe explores the controversy around Mine Your Own Business, a film that “takes a harsh look at the efforts of advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and other non-governmental organizations to thwart plans for huge open-pit mining projects around the world” and was financed by a Canadian mining company. The […]