Amir Bar-Lev, director of The Tillman Story, was no great insider to his subject, post-NFL athlete and US Corporal Patrick Tillman, when he began making his film. "I knew there were myths around his death," Bar-Lev says, "but what began to intrigue me was when we found out there were equally as many myths about his life."

Bar-Lev's last film, My Kid Could Paint That, is about a could-be toddler art-prodigy with a curiously unsuccessful painter-father. As My Kid also traffics in themes of family and misrepresentation, the director "sheepishly handed over a copy of the film [to the Tillman family] as an example of my work. I had to tell them, ‘Unless Pat's dad was secretly playing football for him...'"

Pat Tillman was a popular professional football player before deciding to enlist. A tall and imposing 25-year-old, Tillman was on his second tour when he was pronounced dead. As the news had brought such attention to this man who left a multi-million-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to fight for his country, his death was a project for careful PR. Military publicity transformed this already principled and courageous figure into a hero--and they did this by rewriting the details of his death. Armed with a massive box of records, Dannie Tillman, Pat's mother, uncovered a considerable revision of history. Pat, the victim of friendly fire, was killed during an awkwardly plotted expedition by his own troops, many of whom reported they were just eager to be in a firefight. Pat Tillman was a public figure because of his career, and his decision to enlist put him in the public eye for new reasons, so it's easy to see why his loss, a national tragedy by its very nature, could not be reported as an accident besot with incompetence.

The Tillman Story features an incredible amount of report footage, the most impressive of which was footage that may or may not have been taken from the expedition during which Tillman was killed. This footage, which was captured from a vehicle, is disarmingly unspecific; neither people nor distinguishing traits of landscape appear, so what we see, which might otherwise present us with all the answers we need, is actually no evidence at all--there is no answer in the image.

 "Pat's last words were ‘I'm Pat Fucking Tillman,'" notes Bar-Lev. "On one level he was saying, ‘I'm your platoon-mate,' trying to indicate to the soldiers shooting at him from 40 meters away for 15 minutes. In retrospect, there's a deep irony. Only minutes after he died, people would begin turning him into something he wasn't, so his last words sound like a call from the dead, from a guy saying, ‘I'm just who I am, don't make me something I'm not'--which is exactly what happened."

It's easy to find the situation confusing; after all, this homegrown success story leaves a lucrative NFL contract to fight in Afghanistan. Just based on that choice, he sounds like a hero in the old guard. However, as Bar-Lev points out, "He wasn't, as they described him, ‘above all, principled'; he wasn't a paragon of moral certitude; he was curious and tried to see things from every possible point of view." And, in a way, that desire to see from many vantage points is what Bar-Lev is trying to return to his subject--a man who took risks and won games like the best leaders of legend, but was flattened into a fake icon and exploited by national media. The curious part of this dehumanizing is distinguishing the culprits from the messengers. Was it a failure of intelligence or a failure of reporting? Regardless, those in charge of the information weren't going to help.

Tillman's mother was tireless. A short period after his death, the Army relinquished its intelligence on the incident to her. Presented with thousands of pages about a son's death, most parents would throw up their hands, but she dug through the material and found the roots of what amounted to a government cover-up. Forcing an opportunity to get answers from Congress, the family took part in a hearing. Confronting the generals in charge would seem like a promising conclusion to a battle with injustice and false impression, but it wasn't. "When audiences see the scene in the congressional room, they're vocally angry, yelling at the screen, because it's so patently obvious [what's happening]," Bar-Lev notes. "But that's not at all how it was reported; those generals gave this kind of Keystone Kops, self-flagellating, disingenuous apology--‘Gee, we're sorry we screwed this thing up'-- and it was reported as ‘Military Apologizes to The Tillmans.' We all engage in sound bites, but the treatment of Tillman to this point flattens him, shaving off sides of his personality to conform to a Hollywood cookie-cutter [ideal]."

An illuminating outtake in the film shows a congressman trying to calm Dannie Tillman at the hearing. "She asked a basic question, and one of these patronizing lieutenants said, ‘Ma'am, this was like the first scene in Saving Private Ryan.' What a great post-modern moment! Everyone knows Hollywood learns about warfare from the military--but the military learns about soldiering from Hollywood. It goes back through this hall of mirrors to the beginning of time; it's a chicken-and-egg thing. You have to believe these 19-year-old kids from Pat's platoon, the ones who shot on his position with these powerful and somewhat fun weapons, were learning how to shoot them partially from training and partially from films."

In the process of reviewing Tillman, Bar-Lev describes a different model of heroism; he considers this a necessity, given the actions of his subject and those of the Tillman family. "I hope the story of Tillman tells us that heroism and humanity are not contradictory and heroism is complex," he maintains. "‘Hero' is a problematic word that says a lot more about the people using it than the person they're speaking about."

On the pitfalls of representing a subject that's so extensively about misrepresentation, Bar-Lev observes, "There may not be such thing as ‘Truth.' but there is definitely such thing as a bullshit-lie, and that's between you and your footage. Your cutting is your opinion."

The Tillman Story begins at a football field during a ceremony to honor Tillman and his family. The first we see of him is in direct address as he's shooting the footage on which his performance statistics will be overlaid for TV broadcast. This footage, without the benefit of stats to give the eerie piece context, just shows Tillman looking forward, silent, waiting for the cameraman to let him leave. He looks at the camera in pregnant silence, and we don't know why. "He just staring at you for an uncomfortable amount of time, and anytime you're looking at an uncomfortably long silence of a person in front of you, you impose your own narrative," Bar-Lev notes. "And that's what we've been doing to Pat Tillman from the moment he enlisted. He's never had a chance to speak for himself; he's been subject to one narrative or another. At the end of the film, you see that kind of uncomfortably alive footage fossilized into a statue. Our film is bookended by the living Pat and its antipode that's not moving."

The statue of Tillman, which stands in front of the University of Phoenix Stadium at the newly titled Pat Tillman Freedom Plaza, captures a famous image of Tillman in motion--it's a bronze re-creation of the Sports Illustrated cover shot of Tillman the day he helped the Cardinals win a game against the Dallas Cowboys. "We called that the Han Solo moment," Bar-Lev explains. "You remember, when he was dipped in the vat of--Wow, dipped into that vat of something we don't have on this planet!"

The Tillman Story premieres in theaters August 20 through The Weinstein Company.

Sara Vizcarrando is a film journalist writing and living in San Francisco, Calif.

Editor's Note: Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished airs Tuesday, May 3, on PBS' Independent Lens. The following article was published last August in conjunction with the film's theatrical premiere.

A Film Unfinished takes audiences on a journey back some 68 years in time to life in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. The film was conceived, written and directed by Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski, who has artfully blended archival footage taken by German cameramen as content for a Nazi propaganda film with images of a handful of survivors sharing painful memories of the Holocaust.

The 89-minute documentary was produced by Belfilms LTD with the support of the New Israel Foundation for Cinema and Television, Yad Vashem Project and YES Docu. It earned the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Best International Documentary Feature Award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival earlier this year. The documentary was subsequently picked up for theatrical distribution by Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Hersonski began her career as a freelance director and editor after graduating from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in 2003. She subsequently edited a weekly documentary program that aired on Channel 10 in Israel. A Film Unfinished was her first turn at the helm during production of a feature-length documentary.

The Warsaw ghetto came into being after the German army invaded and occupied Poland in April 1940. More than 400,000 Jewish people who lived in Warsaw were forced to live in a walled ghetto that occupied less than three square miles. Countless numbers of them  and more than 200,000 refugees who were brought to the ghetto, died of  starvation, typhus and other diseases. Most survivors were sent to almost certain death at Treblinka and other concentration camps.

An hour's worth of film footage was discovered in an East German archive at the end of World War II, with the title Das Ghetto written on the cans. The black-and-white film was produced by German cameramen who were brought to the ghetto in May 1942.  During the 1960s, a German historian, who was doing research about the ghetto in a Polish archive, found an entry permit given to a German cameraman named Willy Wist. In 1998, Adrian Wood, a British researcher, was looking for footage from the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in a vault on a US Air Force base in Germany, and he noticed two film cans on the floor titled Das Ghetto. Wood had years of experience with Holocaust footage, and what he had found was multiple outtakes of  scenes where German cameraman and S.S. guards accidentally got into backgrounds while other people were shooting. That film provided tangible evidence that scenes of Jews living the high life were staged propaganda.

"A Film Unfinished emerged out of my preoccupation with the notion of the perpetrators of war crimes creating an archive that testifies to the suffering of their victims," Hersonski says. "The systematic documentation of these horrors has changed forever how the past is archived. These images have been used in many films. In the worst cases, they have been presented as straight-forward historical truth."  

In 2006, Hersonski wrote a short essay outlining her ideas for a documentary and submitted it to Noemi Schory, an experienced film producer in Israel. That was less than a year after Schory had completed her work on the new Visual Center at the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, which includes more than 100 short films that use archival footage. Schory told Hersonski about a diary written by a 15-year-old girl, which describes a German camera crew making a propaganda film in the ghetto.

About a month later, Hersonski traveled to Jerusalem to watch a copy of the 62-minute rough cut of the Nazi propaganda film that was never released. "After so many years of being bombarded with films about the Holocaust, I was shocked that I didn't know anything about this film," she says. "Until you see it, you can't understand the evil behind its making, and the distorted ways it was used in dozens of documentaries after the war. I asked myself, How can a propaganda film shot from the point of view of the perpetrators of  a crime truly reflect the realities facing the victims?"

Hersonski traveled to Berlin to meet the archivists and learn more about the history of the footage. She discovered that approximately 90 percent of the film created by the Nazis was destroyed during the last days of the war. No documents were found revealing who initiated the propaganda film and why it wasn't completed.

Schory and Itay Ken-Tor, a producer/director, who has been worked at Belfilms since 2000 and managed the organization for the past three years, came on board as producers. Hersonski credits a "persistent" Israeli researcher for finding nine survivors of the crimes committed in the Warsaw ghetto. They were teenagers or younger during the war, and they now lived in Israel, England, Poland and the United States. She contacted them and asked if they would be willing to be filmed sharing memories and their thoughts while watching film found in the archives. "I explained in detail what they were going to see, and asked if they were absolutely certain they could stand the shock," Hersonski says. "I was relieved that five of them were more than willing to come. After every session, I was physically numb and mentally worn out. The four women who were filmed watching and commenting on the archival footage live in Israel. The only man [among the five participating survivors] died last year."

Willy Wist, one of the German cameramen who were brought to Warsaw to shoot Das Ghetto, also agreed to share his memories. He had been called to testify when the West German government prosecuted war criminals during the 1960s. "We had no idea of what was happening until we arrived," he recalls in the film. "The thought that these people would be systematically murdered never entered my mind. The SS brought us Jews whom they wanted us to film. We could see the fear on their faces." After 30 days, the film crews packed their gear and left. 

A Film Unfinished ranges from close-in shots of faces of starving adults and children to a staged scene in a restaurant where waiters are carrying trays stacked with food to show the world the paradise that rich Jews lived in. There are haunting close-ups of the faces of the survivors and Wist sitting in a darkened cinema, sharing their feelings as they watch images projected on the screen-such as people desperately searching for food in piles of trash at a garbage dump, while one of the survivors recalls doing that when she was ten years old. In another scene, Wist reminisces about filming a staged shot of an attractive woman looking in a mirror as she applies lipstick; shots like that one were designed to contrast with film of a shabbily dressed woman walking on the street, carrying her baby and begging for bread. Itai Neeman, an Israeli cinematographer, heightens the drama with intuitively sensitive composition and use of light and darkness playing on the faces and eyes.

The man whom the Nazis had appointed director of the Jewish Council was filmed sitting at his desk looking like a corporate executive. He obeyed the Nazis, but wrote entries in his diary expressing his feelings. Other people risked their lives by documenting history as it was happening, in their diaries-some of which, including the one maintained by the council director, were also found in archives. Hershonski had a narrator verbally punctuate images by reading appropriate words selected from the diaries. "A time will come when no survivors are left," she says. "The archival footage, unlike paper documents, bears a much more layered testimony regarding the realities it witnesses. It will remain as our source of understanding our history. The film will testify to the crimes that were committed and the suffering of the victims."

On August 5, despite appeals by Oscilloscope Laboratory president Adam Yauch, Hersonski and Hanna Abrusky, one of the survivors who appears in the film, the MPAA classification and ratings appeals board upheld an "R" rating for A Film Unfinished. The reason given was that the film contains "disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities, including graphic nudity."

The "graphic nudity" is a brief shot of a few naked men and women separately stepping into a pool, which the narrator describes as a ritual Jewish bath. It is a graphic example of how the Nazis staged shots designed to denigrate Jewish people.

Yauch argued to the MPAA that it is important for young people to see A Film Unfinished to learn a valuable history lesson. As George Santayana wrote in 1905, "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  

“The MPAA "R" rating is extremely unfortunate,” says Oscilloscope Laboratories co-founder David Fenkel. "Yael has created a really powerful film that has important educational value for people of all ages…especially young people who aren’t familiar with the history. We are still uncovering layers of history of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. This documentary provides an extremely unique and fresh perspective of what the Nazis did in terms of media manipulation.

“It’s disheartening that the MPAA has decided to make it difficult for young people to experience this film,” Fenkel continues. “It's really crazy, because there are films with extreme violence and sex that get PG-13 ratings, but apparently it’s okay to censor history. Sure, some of the images in this film are not easy to watch, but a lot of truth isn't necessarily easy to watch. We should leave the choice up to the parent and teachers who believe that it is important to educate children. The realities of an “R” rating make it more difficult. But, I believe this film is good and important enough to get a wide audience. I believe this story about World War II is going to become a topic of conversation this year and for years to come.”

A Film Unfinished opens August 18 in New York City and August 20 in Los Angeles.

Bob Fisher has been writing about documentary and narrative filmmaking for nearly 40 years, mainly focusing on cinematography and preservation.

Many documentary filmmakers are driven by a desire not only to tell compelling stories but also to have an impact on public policies and laws. When such filmmakers see an injustice or abuse, they may make great sacrifices to bring the truth to light in hopes that change will come. The journey often brings them to the doors of Congress, where so many policies are made and amended.

This can lead to an awkward interaction with policymakers, who at times are part of the problem, yet whose leadership is needed to be part of the solution.

Having worked in communications for over a decade with social change organizations and on Capitol Hill, I have heard frustrations vented from both sides--certain politicians may seem too risk-averse, too beholden to powerful interest groups, while certain activists may appear too idealistic, too dogmatic to accept any compromise. And if you see a kid coming at you with a videocamera...

However, filmmakers and policymakers have much to gain by trying to understand each other better and by finding ways to work together more productively, when appropriate. After all, many policymakers, like many filmmakers, are doing this because they want to make a difference, to save the world--or at least some piece of it.

To put it another way, filmmakers create compelling stories that need action, while lawmakers take actions that need compelling stories, in order for the public to understand and support these actions. For example, Congresswoman Louise Slaughter is an outspoken advocate for food safety. Last year she introduced the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act to make sure antibiotics used in farm animals do not harm humans. However, as she told Reuters news service, "We're up against a pretty strong lobby. It will really come down to whether members of Congress want to protect their constituents or agribusiness."

Fortuitously, the documentary film Food, Inc. was released around the same time. According to Sonny Sinha, one of her staffers, Rep. Slaughter established a relationship with filmmakers Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein and then hosted a special screening for policymakers in Washington, DC. This high-profile screening increased the film's national exposure, which brought food-safety issues to the forefront of public discussion. Rep. Slaughter followed the screening with a Congressional hearing on the same topic. By the end of the year, her bill had 100 co-sponsors and a related food safety bill was passed in the House of Representatives.

This is one example of how filmmaking can have a positive, synergistic relationship with policymaking.

The Policymaking Process

If you want your film to impact policy, it is important to have a clear strategy of where in the policymaking process it can have maximum impact.

Here are some potential entry points in that process:

1) Raising Awareness--Determine your target audience (the public, lawmakers, agency officials, staff, etc.) and find a message or story that will motivate them to action.

2) Building/Promoting a Coalition--Your film may raise the profile of a coalition already doing good work on the issue or inspire a new coalition to form when people realize they share a common cause.

3) Introducing a Bill--A powerful film can inspire lawmakers or their staff to work on new legislation to remedy the problem. The introduction of a bill helps raise the profile of an issue.

4) Holding a Hearing/Investigation--As noted in the example above, films can raise the profile of otherwise routine hearings and help build momentum.

5) Passing a Bill (House, Senate, Conference, President)--A bill's passage usually requires grassroots support. A film can help mobilize the public engagement needed to achieve the passage of a bill.

6) Enforcing Current Law--Sometimes the right laws are already in place but are not properly enforced. A film can raise awareness and pressure officials to do their jobs correctly.

Even if you don't see results right away, films can play an important role in keeping an issue alive until there is sufficient momentum to achieve a solution. It may take years to achieve success. Even if you succeed in making changes, vigilance is required to make sure that the new policies are correctly carried out.

There is also the campaign side of politics--supporting or opposing votes for candidates, ballot measures, etc.--which I won't focus on here, but on which films can have a significant effect.

Building Relationships

Politics is all about relationships and trust. If you want your film to have an impact in Washington, it's important to partner early with like-minded advocacy groups as well as policymakers and their staff. Including interviews with policymakers themselves can raise the profile of your film, as well as encourage investment in the issue from the policymaker down the road. Lining up the right interviews can be a frustrating process, so what follows are a few pointers.

1) Finding the Right Policymaker--You may want to look beyond the famous or high-profile personalities, whose agendas are already crowded, to find someone more knowledgeable on, or with a personal connection to, your topic. Building a relationship with a policymaker who is actually invested will make a big difference. Newly-elected members may be more open to taking a lead on a breaking issue and to investing time and energy to advocate for change.

2) Develop Relationships with Nonprofit and Advocacy Groups who support the issues in your film. Such groups often have established relationships with members of Congress and can help steer you in the right direction.

3) Be Aware of the Constituents That an Elected Official Represents--It can be counterproductive to ask a politician to publicly advocate for an issue that may go against the best interests of his or her constituents. It is better to identify allies who can freely associate with your message. For this reason, it is important to be honest about your agenda from the start.

4) Work Closely with the Policymaker's Staff to prepare for the interview. Staffers on Capitol Hill can help in many ways beyond basic logistics, such as giving you valuable advice and even potential anecdotes to bring up during your interview.

5) Be Persistent in Your Efforts to Schedule an Interview--Even if a policymaker supports your agenda, there are thousands of other responsibilities to manage. Don't take it personally if the schedule changes at the last minute. Capitol Hill is an unpredictable place where crises are a normal occurrence and schedules are in constant flux.

6) Prepare Some Selling points Beforehand to Make Your Case--Lawmakers always look for good stories to tell that support their policy agendas. Many times, filmmakers can discover and develop powerful stories that traditional news media and policymakers don't have time to find. Lawmakers also want their story to be told, particularly when they are fighting for a cause they believe in. So it is helpful to research their values and priorities and how your film may be able to give voice to these.

7) Establish Truth with Your Interview Subject--While guerilla-style documentaries have their place, in most cases you do not want to blindside or otherwise make your subject feel attacked during the interview. Again, trust is important and you probably don't want to develop a reputation for misleading policymakers. Even if you disagree with a policymaker, it will benefit your film and your chances for future interviews on Capitol Hill if you let them fully explain their position rather than taking their words out of context. Presenting these deep disagreements  honestly will increase public understanding and hopefully encourage progress.

Promoting Solutions

When portraying politics in films and documentaries, as well as in the news media, it's easy to take shortcuts, oversimplify or fall back on old stereotypes. For the sake of your audiences and the democratic process, please take time to understand and to educate. Documentaries actually have a greater chance of doing this well than cable news, with its short segments and real-time analysis. Congress is complicated, but citizens need to grasp how and why policies are the way they are, so they can engage effectively.

While there are many easy targets to attack (i.e., bills are long, the federal government is big, corporations are greedy, etc.), identifying practical answers can be much harder. Try to show workable solutions. If audiences later demand solutions based on faulty evidence or unrealistic proposals, it only makes the process more difficult.

Nothing is ever final in Washington: Bills may pass but not be signed; laws may not be enforced or may be changed. So there is always an opportunity to make a difference if you are prepared.

Will Jenkins has worked in media production, social action and political communications for the last decade. He currently works in the United States Congress. This essay is drawn from a panel presentation at the 2010 AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival. For questions or further information, he can be contacted at 202-228-5258.

Week 2 of IDA's 14th Annual DocuWeeks begins today with six films screening daily at the ArcLight Hollywood and at the IFC Center in New York. The Los Angeles lineup for August 6 through August 12 includes Apaporis, Louder Than a Bomb, My Perestroika, Steam of Life (Miesten vuoro), Summer Pasture and This Way of Life. Films screening through August 12 in New York include Budrus, For Once in My Life, HolyWars, Most Valuable Players, Pushing the Elephant and Quest for Honor.

Tickets are available online at the links above or at the ArcLight (6360 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood) and IFC Center (323 Sixth Ave @ W. 3rd St., New York) box offices.

Editor’s Note: Waste Land, an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, will be screening Saturday, February 26, at 4:00 p.m., as part of DocuDay LA at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills, and at 5:10 p.m. at DocuDays NY at The Paley Center for Media in Manhattan.

Over the past couple of weeks, we at IDA have been introducing our community to the filmmakers whose work is represented in the DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase, which runs from July 30 through August 19 in New York City and Los Angeles. We asked the filmmakers to share the stories behind their films--the inspirations, the challenges and obstacles, the goals and objectives, the reactions to their films so far.

So, to continue this series of conversations, here is Lucy Walker, director of Waste Land.

Synopsis: Waste Land follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio. There, he photographs an eclectic band of catadores--self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. Muniz's initial objective was to "paint" the catadores with garbage. However, his collaboration with them, as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage, reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Waste Land offers stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit.

IDA:  How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Lucy Walker: One winter, when I was about 21 years old and studying fiction filmmaking in grad film school at New York University, I went to stay with some friends--a bunch of young artists and writers in Galway, Ireland. I arrived early on New Year's morning, and they were still asleep. I was very excited to try my new, first-ever video camera. I filmed everyone as they slowly woke up, made tea on the old potbelly stove, smoked cigarettes while they washed the dishes from the party the night before, and discussed the year ahead; it was a little bit Withnail and I, a little bit Slackers, and I was having a lot of fun filming it.
I really liked the footage, and when I went back to New York I showed it to my beloved directing professor at NYU, Boris Frumin, who compared these kids to Jesus and his disciples (and I could see what he meant!) and encouraged me in my feeling that this was just as interesting as the fictional scenes I was working on. After that, I started compulsively documenting the most interesting young artists and musicians and activists I could find in New York, intending to make a film about their struggles. I ultimately decided it wasn't a sufficiently focused documentary to finish, but I had learned a lot and gotten the bug.

IDA: What inspired you to make Waste Land?

LW: I had finished my previous film Blindsight and was looking for a follow-up project. I was introduced to the artist Vik Muniz and had some very open, organic conversations with him about how we might collaborate to make a documentary. I didn't want to make a film that looked at all his different works like a wide-ranging retrospective art show;  brilliant as Vik's work is, that just doesn't offer a compelling through-line. I love films about art like Quince Tree Sun, which simply focus closely on the making of (or the failed attempt at making, in that film) one single painting.
I showed Vik Blindsight because I thought that one giant, challenging project would make the most dramatic structure for a documentary, as well as the most revealing approach to documenting his art-making process. And, like Erik Weihenmeyer going to Tibet to meet the blind Tibetan students and take them climbing in Blindsight, I challenged Vik to come up with the toughest possible project, one that would test him to the max as a human being, not simply as an artist.
I was stubbornly fixated on the fact that Vik had grown up in Brazil very poor, and had been shot in the leg, and the rich guy who had shot him paid him off with a lot of money, so he bought a plane ticket and came to the United States and pursued his dream of being an art photographer. I love how this story shows how fortune, or life, or fate, or the universe, or God, or whatever you call it, knocks us around in surprising ways. And it was pretty shocking to me how rich he was now; as an art photographer, he practically prints money. I thought it would be rich emotional territory for this rich, successful artist to confront the extreme poverty of his childhood.
I remembered watching Ilha Das Flores, a Brazilian movie about garbage, and learning about the catadores, or garbage pickers, from my friend Robin Nagle, who was in my triathlon club at NYU and taught an amazing seminar all about garbage. I had been so fascinated by Robin's work that I audited her class and went along to Freshkills landfill in Staten Island, and thought that it would make a genius location for a movie. This was long before Garbage Dreams, another beautiful documentary, so I guess I wasn't the only person to have this idea!
But this idea was perfect for us because Vik had previously done a series of works called Pictures of Junk\, which I found utterly captivating, and also a fantastic visual metaphor for how we can use documentary filmmaking to get very close to people who are normally so far away. For Vik to go to a landfill in Brazil and collaborate with the catadores there to make giant pieces of art seemed like the ideal story to follow to make a film, and once we had this idea, I stubbornly insisted on it, and then we had an amazing team to make it happen.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making this film, and how did you overcome them?

LW: Like all my films, this was an awful challenge! Not least because we had to work in the garbage dump--with all the attendant horrors of smells, dangers and threat of violence because of the favelas being controlled by drug traffickers and garbage dumps being used to hide guns, drugs and even dead bodies. I was terrified, but I knew that if people were working there every day, and if Vik wanted to go and work with them, then I should be courageous enough to go along and film it, because it was sure to be absolutely fascinating material.
I had so many vaccinations before I went that I could barely move my arms when I arrived in Brazil! And then I made the mistake of watching Manda Bala and showing it to our team, so then we had to go get kidnap insurance! Fortunately we had the most wonderful producer in Angus Aynsley, who believed unwaveringly in my talent and in Vik's, and who 100 percent supported our collaboration from the very beginning, including setting up all our conversations and financing our initial trips until we were able to make a trailer and raise production funds from the Brazilian government. We also had brilliant collaborators across the board, and I am really proud of the craft elements in the film--the cinematography by Dudu Miranda, the editing by Pedro Kos and the music by Moby.

IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the pre-production, production and post-production processes?

LW: In a way, the film is exactly what I was hoping for. And the film is structured in a very chronological way. I was very strict about filming everything, from the very beginning of Vik's thinking about the idea, so that the viewers can observe the absolute entire process from start to finish. And I insisted that nothing happened off-camera, so that we were filming things freshly as Vik was negotiating them.
This being my third documentary, I was happy that I had learned a lot of lessons the hard way and was able to implement them. In a way, the structure of Waste Land is very similar to those of Devil's Playground and Blindsight as I follow a fascinating group of characters on an extreme journey through a very inaccessible world (whether the Amish community or Mt. Everest or the garbage dump).
The moment when I knew it was going to work was when I got to Jardim Gramacho for the first time and saw Valter, the bard of the dump who uses rhymes to keep everyone going, cycling into the frame. His bicycle was covered in trinkets he had retrieved from the garbage. He honked a grubby eagle-horn and smiled at me. I couldn't believe how charming, funny, funkily dressed, eloquent and soulful he and the other catadores I met all were. And I knew that they would be the beating heart and soul of the movie.

IDA:  As you've screened Waste Land--whether on the festival circuit, or in screening rooms, or in living rooms--how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reactions?

LW: I guess the biggest surprise is that you have an idea and it actually works! Sometimes you can work really hard on something and it doesn't come together, but in this case our expectations were way exceeded. The people we met blew us away. Vik's project turned out to be the most magically transformative one imaginable. And the emotional reaction that the audience can feel about that is so gratifying. We've had a few charmed festival screenings where I've looked across and it seems like everybody's faces are wet, and the whole theater is crying...and of course, I am too because it makes it all so worthwhile.
But it's a slow build: The opening is the first part of a bookend that doesn't pay off until the very end, and I can watch people scratching their heads and wondering if they're in the right theater. But then when the ending does finally roll around, it really does pay off! Everybody who worked on the film could relate to having come through personal challenges where we felt our lives were "in the garbage," and that is a bond shared by the people in the movie, the people who made the movie, and now the people watching the movie.

IDA: What docs or docmakers have served as inspirations for you?

LW: So many! To name just a couple, Hoop Dreams and Streetwise are two films I point to as being especially influential when I was starting out wanting to make vérité films about young people. I couldn't believe the twists and turns of fate in Hoop Dreams--and I think Waste Land for me is really about these big forces that act on our lives, the moments when lives dramatically shift before our eyes.
Streetwise fascinated me because of the amazing trust and access the filmmakers achieved with the homeless young people in the movie. I just couldn't believe that the filmmakers were in the room during such intimate scenes, such as 14-year-olds falling in love or returning home or even dying, and it became the benchmark to aspire to in my own films.
I was lucky enough to study with Barbara Kopple and work for Beeban Kidron, and these two amazing women personally taught me a great deal. I was drinking in everything I could about how they tackled things, and still today their words ring in my ears. For example, Barbara once told me, "You always miss 99 percent of what you know you need, but don't worry; just keep going." And those words encourage me when I miss an important scene, as inevitably happens sometimes in the uncontrollable world of documentary filmmaking.
Pixote, a Brazilian film, was in my mind a lot making Waste Land, because it is such a stunning film about poor outcast young people in Brazil, and also because our wonderful sound recordist was the son of its writer.

Waste Land will be screening July 30 through August 5 at the the ArcLight Hollywood in Los Angeles and August 13 through 19 the IFC Center in New York City.

To download the DocuWeeks^TM program, click here.

To purchase tickets for Waste Land in Los Angeles, click here.

To purchase tickets for Waste Land  in New York, click here.

Editor's Note: For Once in My Life, which won the IDA/Mujsic Documentary Award last month, airs February 1 on PBS' Independent Lens. What follows is an interview we conducted with director/producer Jim Bigham and director/cinematographer Mark Moorman when the film screened as part of IDA's DocuWeeks^TM.

Over the past couple of weeks, we at IDA have been introducing our community to the filmmakers whose work is represented in the DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase, which runs from July 30 through August 19 in New York City and Los Angeles. We asked the filmmakers to share the stories behind their films--the inspirations, the challenges and obstacles, the goals and objectives, the reactions to their films so far.

So, to continue this series of conversations, here are Jim Bigham, director/producer, and Mark Moormann, director, of For Once in My Life.

Synopsis: For Once in My Life is a documentary about a unique band of singers and musicians, and their journey to show the world the greatness--and killer soundtrack--within each of them. The band members have a wide range of mental and physical disabilities, as well as musical abilities that extend into ranges of pure genius. In a cinema vérité style, the film explores the struggles and triumphs, and the healing power of music, as the band members' unique talents are nurtured to challenge the world's perceptions.

 IDA: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Jim Bigham:  I've always loved still photography and capturing that moment that can be suspended in time forever. I was greatly influenced by still photographers, people like Robert Frank. Looking at life as it is without manipulating it and putting those images together in order to tell a story or evoke an emotion was a direction that fascinated me early on. I was fortunate to be exposed to the area of editing docs while attending the London Film School. While being entrenched with several masters of the art there, I learned to appreciate the craftsmanship required in revealing the proper balance of information in a story. 

Mark Moormann: In 1988, in North Florida I met and shot a docu-travel video with Ned Deloach, author of the Diving Guide to Underwater Florida. Soon after, Ned invited me to travel with a group of cave divers he'd assembled to explore and shoot the underground aquifers of the Yucatan Peninsula for Hidden Rivers of the Maya. I shot all the topside 16-mm images and served as the camera technician on the underwater camera systems. I was a young guy at the time, and the expertise, professionalism and attention to detail these divers displayed made a lasting impression on me. On a side note, Wes Skiles, an underwater cinematographer on that expedition, died this week (July 21st) while shooting here in the waters off the Florida coast. RIP Wes Skiles.

IDA: What inspired you to make For Once in My Life?

MM:  I met Javier Pena while shooting a job. During our initial conversation I mentioned making documentaries, and at his urging I related some stories about the making of the music doc Tom Dowd & the Language of Music. He invited me to visit the Goodwill facility in Miami and check out the Spirit of Goodwill Band. I went down there with a camera and shot a band practice. It was obvious there was a terrific story there, with great potential, and I agreed to help Javier develop the project. Some time later, while meeting with director/producer Jim Bigham regarding a documentary I'd helped him shoot, I showed him a short demo of the film project. He and his wife, Cathy, were impressed with the band, and expressed an interest to get involved. We all met with Lourdes Little, executive producer of the film, and the project ultimately became a reality.

JB:  In our meeting, we set goals and determined we would make a film designed to appeal to mass audiences that would change pre-conceived notions about disabilities. We all realized at that time, we were signing on to a passion project.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making this film, and how did you overcome them?

MM:  One of the biggest challenges with any documentary film is getting the audience to care about the characters. In many cases with the Spirit of Goodwill Band members, that involved breaking down some very strong barriers born from preconceptions and misconceptions. At first glance it's easy for audience members (and society at large) to dismiss disabled people's ability to contribute in a meaningful way. While shooting the film, I think we made a real effort to capture the band members on camera as we would any other person. Over time, that allowed their personalities to come out, allowing the audience to relate to these individuals as they would any other person. In the end, it's the band members themselves who show us all how to overcome obstacles, especially when they are playing music for an audience, and their true essence emerges from behind the disability for the audience to see. 

IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the npre-production, production and post-production processes?<

JB: The things that didn't change were the focus of making a film about the characters and the need to tell it in an entertaining fashion. When we first started filming, the only plan was to capture these interesting characters and their music. We were hoping for the storyline to present itself. A couple months into it, we got a lucky break when Miami's mayor, Manny Diaz, along with Emilio Estefan, visited the band and the mayor invited them to play at a large, prestigious event. The film now had a path to follow. From there we found a natural build and a timeline of events to work with. At that point, we began working with Javier Pena on music choices. That meant choosing music where Javier could create interesting arrangements that made full use of all band members and their skills. By working with our editor, Amy Foote, we were able to find the links to keep the story progressing forward and reveal a progression in the characters as well. We tried to find the perfect balance between the music, the characters and the build-up of events. We chose to experiment with The Edit Center in New York, where we were editing, by allowing students to take pieces of the film and edit segments as a student project. It gave us some interesting feedback as to what a general audience might be looking for because it was difficult not to become too attached to all our characters and the moments that impacted us as filmmakers. We also did a couple private screenings to see what scenes had the most impact and to lose other moments that we felt were great but maybe didn't have as much to do with the story.

IDA:  As you've screened For Once in My Life--whether on the festival circuit, or in screening rooms, or in living rooms--how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reactions?  

JB: There's always fear when first showing your film to an audience; you never know what reactions you'll get. But I've been amazed at the strong response of our audiences at the festivals. We've only been in four festivals to date and have received five prizes, three of which were audience awards. Mostly I felt a gratitude and a humbling feeling from people as they watched and learned about the band members and their families. It was the same feeling I've experienced, and I was relieved that those feelings were conveyed. The film seemed to make people proactive. Everyone wanted to know how they could help the band and help the film to be seen. Many were grateful for exposing a sometimes uncomfortable subject in a unique way, and they praised Javier Pena for his work. I'm often surprised that audiences made up of all age groups and backgrounds have gone out of their way to express their love for this film, from young filmmakers and artists to seniors to working class, faith-based groups and more. On more than one occasion grown men have approached me in tears and have expressed that it really struck a chord. That's been absolutely awesome for me, and I feel privileged to have been able to be part of this story. From our positive experiences and a couple of rejections from festivals, we've learned a lot about finding the audience. Although we may not be the sexiest film out there, we do have a very wide audience and are figuring out how to market to them.  

IDA: What docs or docmakers have served as inspirations for you?

MM: I know Jim Bigham and I were both influenced by DA Pennebaker's work. Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop and The War Room all serve as a powerful reminders that as a filmmaker you can capture history-in-the-making, and if you don't, who else will? I was also influenced by the work of the Maysles brothers, and Albert personally taught me a valuable life lesson. I had the honor of sitting next to him on a Sundance panel featuring several distinguished music documentary filmmakers. After all the other panel members introduced themselves to the audience, it was my turn to speak. I had always been more than a little nervous in front of crowds, especially being in this very elite company, but I managed to introduce myself and speak about my film. Upon finishing, I looked beside me to see Albert staring at me with a sly grin. He picked up his microphone like it was a weapon, and told the audience, "He's going to be okay, because he's got respect for his subjects, unlike . . . ," before going on to excoriate a modern-day documentarian for a one-sided, unbalanced approach to making documentaries. The lesson learned? If someone hands you a microphone (or a camera), don't you dare be nervous or timid. You chose this career for a reason: To tell stories, to say what you've got to say, to tell the world a story that needs to be heard.

JB:  In addition to what Mark said, when conceptualizing the story behind For Once In My Life, there were two other films that kept coming up in the back of my mind.   think documentaries such as Jean-Luc Godard's, Sympathy for the Devil and even Milos Forman's narrative classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were both influences in structure and content.

For Once in My Life will be screening July 30 through August 5 at the the ArcLight Hollywood in Los Angeles and August 6 through 12 the IFC Center in New York City.

To download the DocuWeeks^TM program, click here.

To purchase tickets for For Once in My Life in Los Angeles, click here.

To purchase tickets for For Once in My Life in New York, click here.

Editor's Note: My Perestroika opens Friday, April 15, in Los Angeles at the the Laemmle Sunset 5. The following interview with filmmaker Robin Hessman was published last summer in conjunction with IDA's DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase.

Over the next month, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the filmmakers whose work is represented in the DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase, which runs from July 30 through August 19 in New York City and Los Angeles. We asked the filmmakers to share the stories behind their films--the inspirations, the challenges and obstacles, the goals and objectives, the reactions to their films so far.

So, to continue this series of conversations, here is Robin Hessman, director/producer of My Perestroika.

Synopsis: My Perestroika follows five ordinary Russians living in extraordinary times--from their sheltered Soviet childhood, to the collapse of the Soviet Union during their teenage years, to the constantly shifting political landscape of post-Soviet Russia. Using a wealth of footage rarely seen outside of Russia--including home movies from the USSR in the 1970s--the film combines an intimate view of the past with the contemporary lives of these former schoolmates, painting a complex picture of the dreams and disillusionment of those raised behind the Iron Curtain.

IDA: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Robin Hessman: I was very active in theater and music throughout my childhood, and in my teens I became very serious about photography. I suppose documentary film integrated many aspects of visual storytelling that I had always been interested in.
In my freshman year of college, I went abroad to Leningrad (that was the year they voted to re-name it St. Petersburg). I vividly remember landing on the snowy tarmac in January, and being greeted by men in giant fur hats who handed us our sheets of ration coupons (since there was little food in the city.) I think I realized, being there, that no matter how much I had read in advance and how much I intellectually knew about Leningrad and the Soviet Union, it hadn't prepared me for what it would viscerally feel like to experience it. I realized that I had never seen a film set there, and I wondered how different it would have felt if I had.
The very first film I made was a 16mm short. I shot it in the summer of 1991 in Leningrad after the end of my semester studying there. (I was also working at the Leningrad film studio--Lenfilm--that summer on an American horror movie that starred the actor who played Freddy Kreuger in Nightmare on Elm Street.) When I left the USSR to go back to school a few weeks after the August 1991 coup, my film and all the cans of outtakes were taken away from me at the border, since I had no official papers or stamps giving explicit permission to export so many kilometers of film out of the USSR. 
My junior year abroad was spent at VGIK, the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, together with one of my best friends from high school, James Longley (Iraq in Fragments; Sari's Mother). We made a 27-minute documentary that year called Portrait of Boy with Dog. We shot on 35mm black and white cinemascope, and edited on flatbeds from the 1930s. That year at VGIK was such an incredible experience, I decided to stay with my film school class and complete the five-year film directing program.

IDA: What inspired you to make My Perestroika?

RH: I began to think about this film 10 years ago. After I graduated from film school in Moscow, I spent several more years living in Russia producing the Russian Sesame Street, Ulitsa Sezam. By the time I returned to live in the States again, I had spent most of the decade--all of my early adult years--living in Russia. Back in the US, the questions I was asked made me think about the fact that despite the end of the Cold War so many years earlier, there was still a wall when it came to information and understanding about what life was like in the former USSR. Stereotypes and misconceptions prevailed.
So I wanted to make a film about my generation of Russians--the generation that I joined, in a sense, when I went to live there at age 18. They had normal Soviet childhoods behind the Iron Curtain, never dreaming that their society could change. Just coming of age when Gorbachev appeared, they were figuring out their own identities as the very foundations of their society were being questioned for the first time. And then, they graduated from college just as the USSR collapsed, and they had to figure out how to survive in a new world where there were no models to follow. Although I didn't grow up there and I have no Russian family history, I certainly shared their journey throughout the 1990s, adjusting to the evolving post-Soviet Russia. So I was an insider and outsider at the same time, which is a helpful position to be in as a documentary filmmaker.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making this film, and how did you overcome them?

RH: Raising money was the biggest challenge, but I imagine that's true for all documentary filmmakers. I had anticipated that it would take me two to three years to make the film, not the five plus years that it actually did take. But I think I got through it because in my mind it never was a question of if I would finish the film, only a question of how long it would take me. Having no doubt that I would finish someday kept me going steadily forward.
Another challenge for me was actually shooting the film myself. I started out convinced that I would work with a cinematographer. However, it soon became apparent that it would be difficult. First of all, it wasn't easy to find someone with the right eye and experience. In Russia, shooting styles usually vary between two extremes--either elaborative feature films with lighting and cranes, or journalism, where the main point is coverage, with little attention to composition or sensitivity to the subjects you are filming. And I certainly couldn't afford to bring someone to Moscow for months at a time over several years.
The very first day of shooting with a proper camera was with someone I hired...and it was a disaster for so many reasons. Spatially, one couple's kitchen was so small, I had to sit on the floor under the table and call things up to them. More troubling, the atmosphere was totally different. Whereas the couple had been completely at ease with me when I was shooting for research, once the cameraman was there, they stiffened up and became shy. So I really had no choice but to grit my teeth and take the camera in hand.
In the end, however, it was the best thing that could have happened. As the shooting progressed, I realized the extent that working with a cinematographer would have also been a logistical nightmare, as it was never clear in advance when I would be able to film any of the subjects. As a rule, they were not likely to make a plan more than a day in advance, and often it was completely spur of the moment: I would get a phone call and 15 minutes later I'd be trudging off to the metro with gear slung over me every which way. (I was often compared to a Christmas tree with enormous black padded ornaments.) I would never have been able to book time with a cinematographer that way. But more important was the extremely intimate setting that working alone allowed, where it was just me, the camera and the person I was filming. The predicament that filled me with despair when I was beginning proved itself a real gift in the end. And I also found out how much I enjoy shooting.

IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the pre-production, production and post-production processes?

RH: During pre-production, a lot of the ideas were already in place. I knew that I wanted to film several people who had been childhood classmates and had grown up together. (In Russia, a class of about 20 people is together from first grade through the end of high school, so they really know each other well and have an entire shared history.)  I figured that once I found the anchor of the film, I'd meet his or her classmates from there. I interviewed dozens of people during my first trip back to Moscow, and I spent time in several different archives, as well as searching for 8mm home movies. From the very beginning, home movies also were an integral part of my vision for the film, as they provide a privileged and personal view into everyday life of the past, with no agenda other than preserving memories.
And it was also during pre-production that I began thinking about Russia's "unpredictable past" and began to seek out the perspective of history teachers in their 30s. They had been taught one version of the past as children and today are teaching a completely different interpretation of those same events (to students who were born after the collapse of the USSR, and are living in a completely different world.) I began speaking with dozens of history teachers and eventually was lucky enough to meet Borya and Lyuba Meyerson, a married couple who both teach history in the same Moscow grade school. Through them I met childhood classmates Olga, Andrei and Ruslan.
So the film does have all of the elements of the first early proposals I wrote back in 2004 and 2005: childhood classmates telling stories from their Soviet childhoods through their youth during Perestroika and their adult lives in a newly democratic Russia. It interweaves their stories with Soviet archival footage and home movies that show a more intimate view of the past. But there are certainly things I couldn't have predicted at the beginning. For example, I expected the home movies would be of the era and of the age cohort of the subjects, but I never dreamed I'd be lucky enough to have actual home movies of the characters when they were children. (Cameras were relatively rare.) It was a wonderful gift to find out that Borya's father had constantly filmed not only his son, but the entire class. So that was something that came as a total surprise to me.
And most importantly, in the end, no matter how much I might have imagined all of the elements that would go into the film in advance, it is really the characters--Borya, Lyuba, Olga, Ruslan and Andrei--and their stories and generosity and honesty that make My Perestroika what it is. And those specifics were all completely impossible to imagine before I met them.

IDA:  As you've screened My Perestroika--whether on the festival circuit, or in screening rooms, or in living rooms--how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reactions?

RH: I have been so happy with the reactions to the film. The people who did not grow up in the USSR, and remember the Cold War from the West's side, either as children or as adults, have found it eye-opening and fascinating to see how similar "They" were to us. Western Gen X'ers, who are the same age as the characters in the film, have especially connected to seeing what our counterparts' lives were like then and are like today. People who have never been to Russia have expressed the sense that they had an hour and a half of getting to really know these people--sitting in their kitchens and learning about their lives. The way audiences connect with the characters has been really rewarding for me. But it is the audience members who grew up in the USSR who have had the most emotional responses. In Q&As,a few times, people have been moved to tears. Russian-American parents have thanked me for making something that they can show their children to help them understand the world they grew up in. So that was certainly what I had hoped for, but I was surprised by just how powerfully they react to the film.

IDA: What docs or docmakers have served as inspirations for you?

RH: Alan Berliner's film Nobody's Business is always inspirational to me. Other films I looked at in thinking about My Perestroika were the films of Peter Forgascs. He often uses home movies in his films in a way that the personal aspects of life are in the foreground, while "history" takes a backseat. I always watch Fred Wiseman's films whenever possible, too.

My Perestroika will be screening August 6 through 12 at the the ArcLight Hollywood in Los Angeles and August 13 through 19 the IFC Center in New York City.

To download the DocuWeeks^TM program, click here.

To purchase tickets for My Perestroika  in Los Angeles, click here.

To purchase tickets for My Perestroika  in New York, click here.

Documentary filmmakers today gained access to previously "locked" DVD content for fair use in their productions under an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act granted to them by the US Copyright Office.

The exemption was granted as a result of an action spearheaded by entertainment attorney Michael Donaldson, who assembled a coalition of documentarians and filmmaker organizations led by the International Documentary Association and Kartemquin Films, the Chicago-based nonprofit. Donaldson provided legal counsel for the effort on a pro bono basis, along with the USC Gould School of Law Intellectual Property & Technology Law Clinic, led by Professor Jack Lerner. 

The exemption allows documentarians to obtain short portions of material from DVDs, even when that material is behind encryption and other digital locks for any non-infringing use in a documentary. That includes copying public domain materials and to make fair use of other material contained on such DVDs for use in a documentary. This was a crime under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Documentary filmmakers can take advantage of this exemption through October 2012, when the next DMCA rule-making will take place and the filmmakers' exemption will be up for renewal.

Many filmmakers, particularly those who incorporated current or historical events into their work, were previously restricted by the DMCA from using a wealth of material available only on DVD. Today's decision enables them to use everyday cultural material contained on DVDs to tell their stories.  

 "The organizations and filmmakers who have joined together on this issue represent the cornerstones of the documentary filmmaking community in the United States," said Donaldson, in a statement. "The filmmakers knew it was time that they confronted this problem that hampered their work on a daily basis, so we decided to come together as a united front--filmmakers and advocates alike--to change the law. Collectively, this group--five major documentary and independent filmmaking organizations and six award-winning documentary filmmakers--has garnered Peabody Awards, Academy Awards, National Board of Review honors, Sundance Film Festival Awards, MacArthur Foundation recognition for excellence, and some of the most honorable, international distinctions in film over the past 50 years.

"In a digital world without this exemption, fair use existed largely in theory but not in practice," said IDA Board President--and award-winning filmmaker--Eddie Schmidt. "The DMCA forced filmmakers to attempt highly inferior technical methods to avoid breaking digital locks, or prohibited them from using such material at all. Decriminalizing the use of digital excerpts for documentary filmmaking purposes shows that the Copyright Office continues to understand the historical, cultural and journalistic implications of this provision in copyright law and its integral nature to freedom of expression."

 "This exemption will affect documentary filmmakers across our community," said Kartemquin Films Co-Founder and Artistic Director Gordon Quinn. "The DMCA had made it difficult for filmmakers to exercise their fair use rights. Today's ruling removes the unwarranted threat to the exercise of those essential rights--rights that we must be able to use if we are to continue to play a vital role in our democratic culture as reporters, critics, commentators and educators." 

 "This was an important victory for free expression and the essential role that documentary film plays in our democracy," said former USC Law student Chris Perez, a lawyer with Donaldson & Callif who also served on the pro bono legal team while at USC. "To make social, political or cultural critiques, filmmakers need to quote from copyrighted material such as motion pictures. It's well established that this type of use is permitted by the fair use doctrine in copyright law, but the DMCA was preventing it."  

Students from USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic, under the supervision of Professor Jack Lerner and in close collaboration with Michael Donaldson, are now turning to educational and training efforts designed to help documentary filmmakers understand how to use the exemption properly.

Here is a summary of the recommendations of the US Copyright Office:

The exact language is that if you are engaged in documentary filmmaking, you can copy a DVD without violating the DMCA as follows: "solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use..."

In order to qualify for the exemption you must meet all of the following criteria:

1.  You must have lawfully acquired a lawfully made DVD. In other words, don't buy a pirated copy. Don't steal a legitimate copy.

2.  You may only copy short portions of material for a "non-infringing use" which essentially translates into material in the public domain or material that you plan to use pursuant to the doctrine of fair use.

3.  You must be making the copy to use in a documentary.

4.  You want to be sure that you are well aware of public domain and fair use laws.

5.  You must only copy what you need, you cannot copy the entire DVD.

It is important that documentary filmmakers be very diligent in complying with the details of the regulation when they take advantage of the exemption, as the Copyright Office will be reviewing the issue anew in October 2012.

For the complete ruling and Determination of the Librarian of Congress, click here.

Editor's Note: Pushing the Elephant airs March 29, 2011, on PBS' Independent Lens.

Over the next month, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the filmmakers whose work is represented in the DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase, which runs from July 30 through August 19 in New York City and Los Angeles. We asked the filmmakers to share the stories behind their films--the inspirations, the challenges and obstacles, the goals and objectives, the reactions to their films so far.

So, to continue this series of conversations, here are Beth Davenport and Elizabeth Mandel directors of Pushing the Elephant

Synopsis: Rose Mapendo lost her family and home to the ethnic violence that engulfed the Democratic Republic of Congo, yet she emerged from the suffering advocating peace and reconciliation. But after helping numerous victims to recover and rebuild their lives, there is one person Rose must still teach to forgive: her daughter Nangabire, now 17 and living in Arizona. Pushing the Elephant captures one of the most important stories of our age, in which genocidal violence is challenged by the moral fortitude and grace of one woman's mission for peace.

IDA: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Beth Davenport: I started out working in commercials and music videos. I loved the medium of film/video, but wanted to work on social-justice issue films. In 2003, there was an opportunity at our company, Big Mouth Films, the production department of Arts Engine, to help produce a film about girl rockers and to work on the outreach campaign for Deadline, a film dealing with the death penalty. I jumped at the chance to get involved with such disparate projects and have been at Arts Engine ever since.
We believe that filmmakers who document human-interest stories that deal with social justice issues in accessible ways are creating critical tools for engaging audiences, raising awareness, inspiring action and affecting policy.

Elizabeth Mandel: I had a previous career in international affairs. I felt passionately about the issues I was working on--women's economic and political development--but I wanted the opportunity to approach the challenges to women's empowerment, security and autonomy from a more creative perspective.

IDA: What inspired you to make Pushing the Elephant?

BD & EM: Arts Engine is committed to telling multifaceted stories through an intimate lens, and we have both always been interested in making such a film about a strong woman. With the kind of serendipity filmmakers dream of, we learned about Rose and her family just two weeks before the reunion with Nangabire. Here was an opportunity to make a film about a powerful African woman and a refugee who is a leader and an activist, a model we rarely get to see on film or other media sources. We jumped in, confident that in capturing the reunion, we were on the road to tapping into something both unique and universal. For all the unique circumstances of the story, it contains universal truths about the mother-daughter bond and the importance of family, connection and forgiveness--themes to which women everywhere can relate.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making this film, and how did you overcome them?

BD & EM: Because of distance and time, the first time we met Rose and Nangabire, we were already filming. This is unusual for us, in that we usually spend time getting to know our film subjects, building trust, ensuring they understand what it means to agree to have a camera turned on their lives, figuring out the core of the story. However, we realized as soon as we met them how fortunate we were: Sight unseen, we had found subjects who were charismatic, compelling and willing to open up to us.
This presented us with a second challenge, however: how to do justice to the story with which they were entrusting us, while maintaining an unbiased lens to effectively present what happened. One decision we made early on was to allow Rose and her family's stories to be told in their own voices, from their own perspectives, rather than force our views as filmmakers--especially given that we are white women from a Western country. What we aimed to achieve through doing this was to give a voice to the often unheard--women who can tell how war and conflicts affect them, and also can offer solutions and ways for others like them to become empowered.
We are now working closely with Rose and with organizations committed to the issues dealt with in the film--refugee policy, peace-building and women's rights--to develop an audience engagement campaign, to get audiences involved in furthering those issues. In Rose's words, one person alone cannot push the elephant, but many people together can.
The other great challenge was to make sure that the film captured the joy and resilience of the Mapendo family; both because the truth of the story requires it, and because we want the film to be palatable to audiences and not feel like a school lesson. Throughout the editing process, we made sure to include moments of humor and lightness, as well as a lot of the music that is integral to the Mapendos' home life. We hope that we did justice to the feeling of wholeness Rose has maintained in her family's life.

IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the pre-production, production and post-production processes?

BD & EM: Surprisingly, the film's themes have remained fairly consistent from the beginning. We knew we wanted to make a film about women and war, mothers and daughters, and the importance and challenge of public and personal forgiveness. The big change was that we thought those themes would revolve exclusively around Rose and Nangabire (which, for a long time, was the working title for the film). And then along came Aimee's story. Early on, Rose hinted that there was more to Aimee's story than we knew, and as the full story was revealed, that changed the arc of the narrative. However, it did not change our original themes; rather, it enhanced them. Rose's reveal of it, both as it unfolded to us and as it unfolds in the film, also enhanced the theme of the power of talking and storytelling to heal, and added the complex question of Rose's ability to forgive herself.

IDA:  As you've screened Pushing the Elephant-whether on the festival circuit, or in screening rooms, or in living rooms-how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reactions?

BD & EM: We have been very gratified to find that we have been successful in communicating the many themes of the film, and that the film has been inspiring people to ask us how they can get involved in the many political issues raised. We have also been surprised to find the many personal lenses people bring to bear on the film, and how that affects their reactions. This ranges from people finding ways to use it in their own activism that we never thought of--such as part of an African women's health initiative--to inspiring people to find forgiveness in their own lives. Following one of our screenings, one of our colleagues received a message from a friend saying that because of the film, she had found a way to forgive someone important in her own life.

IDA: What docs or docmakers have served as inspirations for you?

BD: Films like Marshall Curry's Street Fight and Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans have been very influential for me. Films like these take great risks, turning on a camera with no guarantee that a story will emerge. I admire directors who have the temerity to follow their guts. They are also great films in the degree of access they managed to maintain. What makes a family reveal their very deep, extremely dark secrets to the camera--to the public--the way the Friedmans did? A patient, persistent director. Street Fight is a terrific example of getting an audience involved in an issue they might have just glossed over in the newspaper: local politics, deep-seated corruption. It was honest and hard-hitting without being sensationalist. And Curry's faith in his subject was beautiful to watch.

EM: As part of a women's rights seminar in graduate school I saw a film called Something Like a War, by Deepa Dhanraj, about India's forced sterilization program. I think it was this film that first planted the seed in my mind regarding the power of film to educate. Years later, when I was planning a career change, I kept thinking about how that film affected me; it got my attention, made me want to take action, and stayed with me. I also really admire films that tackle difficult subjects in an unconventional way, like Byron Hurt's Beyond Beats and Rhymes. The film focuses on men in its examination of gender and culture (which seems the obvious thing to do, but somehow isn't), and because it's also a fun film with great music, reaches an audience that might not otherwise watch a film about gender dynamics. 
While we are committed to making social-justice issue films, we would both love someday to make a film like Spellbound or Wordplay, which humorously and respectfully examine quirky subcultures, or Touching the Void, which, through a nail-biting adventure story as gripping as any Hollywood extravaganza, explores human relationships, the balance of responsibility between oneself and others, and the will to live. We also aspire to make a film as aesthetically powerful and true as Rivers and Tides, perhaps the most quietly eloquent art film we've seen.

Pushing the Elephant will be screening August 6 through 12 at the IFC Center in New York City, and August 13 through 19 at the Arclight Hollywood in Los Angeles

To download the DocuWeeks^TM program, click here.

To purchase tickets for Pushing the Elephant in Los Angeles, click here.

To purchase tickets for Pushing the Elephant in New York, click here.

Editor’s Note: Sun Come Up, an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Short Subject, will be screening Saturday, February 26, at 9:00 a.m., as part of DocuDay LA at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills, and Sunday, February 27, at 2:15 p.m. at DocuDays NY at The Paley Center for Media in Manhattan.

Over the next month, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the filmmakers whose work is represented in the DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase, which runs from July 30 through August 19 in New York City and Los Angeles. We asked the filmmakers to share the stories behind their films--the inspirations, the challenges and obstacles, the goals and objectives, the reactions to their films so far.

So, to continue this series of conversations, here is Jennifer Redfearn, director/producer of Sun Come Up.

Synopsis: Sun Come Up follows the relocation of some of the world’s first environmental refugees, the Carteret Islanders – a community living on a remote island chain in the South Pacific Ocean. When rising seas threaten their survival, the islanders face a painful decision: they must leave their beloved land in search of a new place to call home.

IDA: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Jennifer Redfearn: I studied environmental science in college and thought I would become a tropical ecologist. In my last year, I took a film and photography course and fell in love with it. From there I worked my way up the ranks as a PA, AP, field producer, and producer. After producing for NOVA, Discovery and others, I decided to try my hand at an independent project.

IDA: What inspired you to make Sun Come Up?

JR: In 2008 a close friend showed me a humanitarian alert; it was the story of the Carteret Islanders. At the time, I didn't realize climate change was forcing people from their land, and I was shocked to learn of their story. I have a background in environmental science and journalism, and I realized that if I hadn't heard of the issue, then probably a lot of other people hadn't either. It seemed like an incredibly important story to tell.
After researching the story, I learned that the Carteret Islanders were negotiating for a new home on Bougainville, an island recovering from a 10-year civil war that had started over a different environmental issue--mining. Many Bougainvilleans lost their land, their livelihood and their sense of security during the war. There are parallels between their history and the story of the Carteret Islanders. I thought a deeper story might exist about two communities, both uprooted due to environmental tragedies, uniting over a common purpose or understanding.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making this film, and how did you overcome them?

JR: The greatest obstacle in making the film was the distance and inability to contact most of the islanders beforehand. The Carteret Islands are quite remote, and they don't have a way of communicating with the outside world, apart from a radio that connects them to Bougainville. The head of the Carteret's relocation program, Ursula Rakova, now lives on Bougainville and is working on the ground to facilitate the move through the islanders' own NGO, Tulele Peisa. I contacted her, and she helped us make plans to travel to the islands by boat once we arrived in the region.
The other obstacle was the lack of supplies and electricity on the Carteret Islands. We packed in almost everything we needed, including solar panels to charge the camera batteries. The camera's tape compartment jammed on Day 2 of the shoot, and I thought that was the end of the film! We were interviewing an island elder, Bernard Tunim, on Piul, one of six of the Carteret Islands. He encouraged us to be patient, and eventually we were able to open it and start rolling again.

IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the pre-production, production and post-production processes?

JR: We initially wanted to follow the islanders moving, but when the move was delayed and Ursula explained that a group of young people was going to Bougainville to build relationships and negotiate for new land, I realized that their search for land could be a much more interesting development to follow. It seemed like such a rare process, and a crucial one to their relocation, especially in a region of the world where land is so intimately tied to identity, community and history.
We didn't have the opportunity to pre-interview anyone, so not too much changed during the production process. The challenge was making quick decisions about who and what to follow when we arrived on the Carteret Islands and later in Bougainville.
In post, we had to narrow down our characters, and a couple of the people we followed didn't make it into the film. Also, we initially covered the civil war in more depth. We struggled a lot with how to cover it responsibly and in a way that didn't take the viewer out of the vérité narrative. Too often, places are defined by something horrific, and local communities struggle against a narrative that has defined them over and over in media. The war is important in the region, but people are also moving on. I think we eventually succeeded in finding a way to cover it and show its importance without over-dramatizing it.

IDA:  As you've screened Sun Come Up--whether on the festival circuit, or in screening rooms, or in living rooms--how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reactions?

JR: The reaction to the film has been very positive. I was so nervous during our premiere at Full Frame, but the audience was great--laughing in the right places, gasping in the right places--and a woman next to my producer cried. We've also been surprised and thrilled at our audience's generosity. People ask us all the time how they can help. In response, we've created an outreach campaign to educate communities about climate change and displacement and to give them tools to help. Now community groups can host a screening and a "houseraiser"--a fundraiser that will help pay for houses for the Carteret Islanders.

IDA: What docs or docmakers have served as inspirations for you?

JR: This is the most difficult question to answer, as so many docmakers and films inspire me. I had the privilege of working with incredible filmmakers on Sun Come Up--Tim Metzger, who has such an amazing eye for light and images, and who seamlessly and courageously blended into whatever was happening in the moment and captured it with respect; David Teague, who has an exceptional talent for finding characters, solid story structure and the emotional heart of films; and Abigail Disney and Tracie Holder, who supported us early on and helped us tease out the important themes in the story. I am in awe of Judith Helfand's dedication to the craft and the voice in her films; I aspire to some day make a film as powerful as War/Dance, by Andrea and Sean Fine; and I'm a huge Errol Morris fan. My tastes in documentaries are eclectic; if I weren't busy making them, I would watch documentaries every night of the week. I'm working with MediaStorm now, and I'm thrilled to be learning more about multimedia and how to integrate photojournalism into documentary narratives.

Sun Come Up will be screening July 30 through August 5, as part of the DocuWeeks Shorts Program, at the IFC Center in New York City.

To download the DocuWeeks^TM program, click here.

To purchase tickets for Sun Come Up, click here.