South by Southwest's March film festival in Austin, Texas (town motto: "Keep Austin Weird") provides, for documentary lovers, an exciting mix of the provocative, the innovative and the downright quirky. And it does so in venues you can actually get to and get into. For documentarians, it also provides a sidebar conference with panels on cutting-edge issues. The festival, curated by Janet Pierson and her team, covers a wide range of styles and subjects, steering clear of the obligatory and earnest. Of course, as one of the more earnest attendees, I was drawn to the social documentaries
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Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary, PomWonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, opens April 22 through Sony Pictures Classics. Like his Oscar-nominated Super Size Me, The Greatest Movie stars Spurlock as a gleeful, on-camera sociologist, but this time he's courting, rather than critiquing, Corporate America as he travels fromManhattan to Hollywood trying to land corporate sponsors...for a film about landing corporate sponsors. No one minds seeing Tony Stark blatantly eating a Whopper or driving an Audi, but no self-respecting documentary director would sink to having a famous social
Named Best Documentary/PSA at the 2011 L.A. Student Media Festival.
IDA is reaching out to the documentary community for support on this important issue.
So you've finally finished your documentary film and authored a DVD (or a Blu-ray; for the purposes of this article, I will use DVD). Whether or not you have a DVD distributor lined up, it's worth investigating how you can sell DVDs independently, so you can maximize your revenue and/or assess your distributor's terms. Selling DVDs directly to customers will maximize your profit potential on a per-disc basis, and can be quite lucrative. If you have a business license and a website, it's easy to add a payment button or storefront and, voila! You're in business. Of course, your sales will be
Doc U April 25: STRAIGHT SHOOTING A Conversation with World Class DPs
Join Cinefamily April 1-3, April 8 for The Ecstatic Truths of Werner Herzog: Documentaries, 1971-1992