At the Vimeo Festival + Awards last year Morgan Spurlock and Lucy Walker (both Shooting People patrons incidentally) sat down with Shooting People co-founder and BRITDOC head honcho Jess Search to discuss documentaries and social change. You can watch the whole panel here: Documentary: The Agent of Change from Vimeo Festival on Vimeo. By the way, the good people at Vimeo have put up lots of other videos from the festival – worth perusing!

Living in Emergency is a film about the work of Doctors Without Borders, focusing on doctors working in Africa. It’s a powerful film: complicated, messy and necessarily uncomfortable viewing. I’ve been wondering when more people would get a chance to see it so am really happy to see that it is opening theatrically in the US on June 4th. More details here: www.livinginemergency.com Living in Emergency Trailer from LivinginEmergency on Vimeo.

Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years in prison twenty years ago tomorrow – February 11th 1990. I just read his extraordinary autobiography Long Walk to Freedom and have been thinking about Mandela and South Africa a great deal recently so I’m really pleased to be moderating a discussion after the screening of Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation at Union Docs on Friday, February 19th. Here’s a description of the film: A captivating view of the indomitable…

Errol Morris posted this hilarious letter from Harvey Weinstein on his website. You gotta love someone who says: “If you continue to be boring, I will hire an actor in New York to pretend that he’s Errol Morris. If you have any casting suggestions, I’d appreciate that.” RIP Miramax.

A huge congratulations to everyone who won last night at the 2010 Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking but more importantly, congratulations to everyone who had a film nominated and to all those who have made and supported docs over the past year. The nominee line-up was pretty darn great and included films I have really loved: Loot, Episode 3 Enjoy Poverty, The Way We Get By and Mugabe and the White African for example. As co-chair AJ Schnack said,…

Below is the trailer for Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism: A Love Story, coming to theaters October 2nd. I am curious to see this but agree with people who say that it seems somewhat dated and that perhaps now would be a much better time for Sicko instead. Was Sicko released too early and Capitalism too late?

This was originally published on the Shooting People Festival Focus blog. I had the privilege of being on the Sterling Short Film Jury at SILVERDOCS, along with Angela Tucker and Bryan Stamp. The films were superb, Angela and Bryan were fantastic fellow jurors and Sky Sitney and the entire SILVERDOCS staff did a really impressive job this year. We awarded the shorts prize to 12 Notes Down by Andreas Koefoed, a beautiful and moving portrait of talent, music and adolescence.…

I’m really thrilled that Shooting People is involved in so many fantastic events this month – from the Rooftop Films panels on Saturday June 13th to the Short Sighted event at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on Sunday June 21st. And now we are also doing a special screening of the powerful documentary Pray The Devil Back To Hell with producer (and all round amazing person) Abigail Disney in attendance. Please join us at DCTV on Thursday, June 25th –…

We (Shooting People) have gotten together with Rooftop Films, Cinereach and IndiePix to bring you some really great filmmaking panels before the screening of Persona Non Grata at Rooftop Films this Saturday, June 13th. This is part of the Rooftop Films 4-day Panorama Weekend which runs from Wednesday to Saturday this week with fantastic films screening each night: www.rooftopfilms.com Panel Schedule: 5:00-6:00pm Message vs. Craft: The Art of Effective “Issue” Storytelling When a filmmaker takes on a topic related to…

According to indieWIRE the audience at Hot Docs jumped 42% from 2008 to 2009 and had record breaking numbers this year (122,000). This is fantastic news for a festival with such a superb line-up of documentaries. The top 10 audience votes reflect just a tiny percent (and range) of the films screened: 1. The Cove (D: Louie Psihoyos; USA) 2. 65_RedRoses (D: Philip Lyall, Nimisha Mukerji; Canada) 3. Inside Hana’s Suitcase (D: Larry Weinstein; Canada, Czech Republic) 4. Best Worst…