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The Five Obstructions turns the concept of documentary on its ear, then spins it around. Though billed as a documentary, The Five Obstructions is a film whose meaning is in subtext rather than in what is visible. The premise is the humiliation by a former student, Danish director Lars von Trier, of his esteemed teacher, documentary filmmaker Jǿrgen Leth, by having his mentor remake his classic short, The Perfect Human (1967)—five ways from hell, according to von Trier's rules. This highbrow challenge, gamely accepted by Leth, is a pretext to the film's greater themes—a meeting between two

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is arguably the Cannes of documentary film festivals. It has always been a very polished organization, largely because its founder and director, Nancy Buirski, has been able to harness the clout she wielded from her days as a photo editor with The New York Times and bring it with her to Durham, North Carolina. Beginning as DoubleTake in 1998, the festival changed its name to Full Frame three years ago. How has the festival succeeded? Buirski credits the high intellectual base in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area for its interest in nonfiction filmmaking

Filmmaker James Lapine discusses how confident the famous composer in an interview, a direct contrast to his vulnerability in front of the piano.

DON'T STOP BELIEVIN' director talks about being on the road with one of the world's most famous rock bands.

The Sundance Institute recently named Tabitha Jackson as the new director of its Documentary Film Program (DFP); she succeeds Cara Mertes, who stepped down this past summer to take on the director position at the Ford Foundation's JustFilms program. Jackson will plan and implement strategic partnerships, oversee the DFP's funding programs and host five annual Labs for documentary filmmakers. As she moves from London—where she served as commissioning editor for arts at Channel 4 Television—to Los Angeles, she brings more than 20 years of experience in the documentary and nonfiction field. While

'Tim's Vermeer' opens nationwide through Sony Pictures Classics.

'At Berkeley' airs January 13 on PBS' 'Independent Lens.'

Over the past five or six years, two of the leading national sports networks—ESPN and Fox Sports Net—have developed documentary series that have taken their places among the pantheon of the sports documentary genre. ESPN Classic's SportsCentury has earned Emmys and Peabodys for its flood-the-zone approach to telling the story of the world's greatest athletes, while Fox Sports Net has carved its own niche with Beyond the Glory, a series of profiles of some of the most legendary and controversial athletes in recent history-narrated, for the most part, by the athletes themselves. With three

If there's one image that sums up the overwhelming workload of our nation's public defenders, it can be found in the middle of Dawn Porter's recent documentary Gideon's Army. The image surfaces when we enter the office of Travis Williams, a young attorney who is practically buried by mountainous stacks of papers and files that amount to his current and ongoing caseload. At times tackling over 100 cases simultaneously, Travis is just one of the 15,000 men and women who provide proper legal council and services to those in the US who could not otherwise afford an attorney. Along with several

" To Be and To Have isn't a documentary in the traditional sense, with a demonstrative and didactic approach," says its maker, Nicolas Philibert. "I wanted to tell a story." That "traditional" documentary is passing away, and this approach, which Philibert so masterfully executes in his story of a teacher and his young students in a one-room schoolhouse in rural France, is becoming more conventional than unconventional. Philibert doesn't tell us that learning is difficult; he shows us with scenes of boys and girls struggling at home while their mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles all gather