Two fun events in Brooklyn tonight for New Yorkers wanting some Monday night doc-action. Me! Me! First, Sync or Swim is playing at McCarren Park Pool - fun starts at 6pm and the film starts at 8pm. This will be one of the last events held at the venue before construction begins to turn the pool back into a, um, pool!

Meanwhile across Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series, curated this week by Michael Tully, brings a screening of John Maringouin’s unsettling Running Stumbled to the lovely Barbes back room, preceded by 1983, a short by Jeff Peixoto. If you’re heading to Barbes the films start at 7pm.

Ooh, that’s way too much activity for a Monday night! I feel rather faint.

The Intelligent Factual Televisual Festival starts tomorrow at The Arts Club in London - 2 days of televisual education with panels allowing you to hear from lots of different commissioning editors. Topics include Alternative Sources of Funding and Where Next for Factual and feature loads of big names in British telly like Peter Bazalgette, Roger Graef, and Stephen Lambert - plus some great doc filmmakers including Kim Longinotto, Brian Woods and Leo Regan.

I’m at Silverdocs till Thursday so shall be going to some panels of my own (including this frightening sounding trio: Does Public TV Have a Future? Future of Non-Fiction Storytelling, U.S. Factual Budgets Forecast). I only wish I could beam myself between the two events to take the televisual temperature on both sides of the Atlantic!

We had a fantastic evening of panels at Rooftop Films on Saturday night - and the rain was no match for the incredible folk at Rooftop Films and their magical Brooklyn Can Factory! My favorite quote from the evening has to be this from Esther Robinson during the Cinema and Social Justice panel: “Make your life good, don’t get in a lot of debt and do something meaningful.” Amen Sister!

Photo: Copyright Sarah Palmer 2008
Cinema and Social Justice: Simon Kilmurry (P.O.V.), Ryan Harrington (Gucci Tribeca Fund), Esther Robinson (Director, A Walk Into The Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory), Katy Chevigny (Arts Engine and Director, Election Day) and moderator Danielle DiGiacomo (IndiePix)

Photo: Copyright Sarah Palmer 2008
The Art of Short Film: Casimir Nozkowski, Signe Baumane, Benh Zeitlin, Duana Butler and moderator Mark Rosenberg (Rooftop Films)

Photo: Copyright Sarah Palmer 2008
The rain didn’t stop us!

The acclaimed documentary series P.O.V. begins its Summer Season on PBS on June 24th with Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade, the story of Browne’s slave-trading New England ancestors and her family’s contemporary retracing of the trade triangle (and the fallout that ensues). See the complete list of films screening this Summer on P.O.V. here.

Yance Ford, P.O.V.’s Series Producer will be at DCTV at 7.30pm tonight to talk at a Shooting People/DCTV event about how the films are chosen, the history of P.O.V., the social outreach element of what they do and the role of docs on public television. There are exactly 10 tickets left at this point so snap one up now if docs are your thing on a Friday night (je suis so rock and roll!)

Summer is here which means that Rooftop Films are back on Friday, June 6th with This Is What We Mean By Short Films. This is very good news indeed for fans of film, lovers of New York City, and appreciators of fine rooftops.  I am always happy to sit outside under the stars and watch beautifully curated shorts and features so I was pleased as punch to get involved with the Rooftop Films Panorama which is happening next week, June 12-14. On Saturday, June 14th Rooftop Films, Shooting People and IndiePix will be presenting two panels before the Industriance shorts program at The Old American Can Factory: Cinema and Social Justice and The Art of the Short Film. Panelists include Ryan Harrington (Gucci Tribeca Fund), Simon Kilmurry (P.O.V.), Esther Robinson (Director, A Walk Into the Sea: The Danny Williams Story), Katy Chevigny (Arts Engine and Director, Election Day) Benh Zeitlin (Filmmaker, Glory at Sea), Duana Butler (Filmmaker, Curator of ReelNY) and Signe Baumane (animator).

It’s going to be an amazing evening of panels, music and films -  tickets are only $6 online so please come out to play.

Shooting People run a really fun series of networking events with DCTV called Hook Me Up. It’s like speed-dating but you get to talk about your skills and your projects rather than about why blue is your favorite color and why you’re a cat person and not a dog person (look I don’t know what people talk about when they go speed-dating ok!) The next one is happening on Tuesday, June 10th at 7.30pm and this time we’re going to have a room packed with both narrative and documentary filmmakers.

The application deadline is Sunday, June 1st so get your applications in asap if you want to find new, creative people to work with.

I’ve been distracted from blogging for the past week by many things. First, I have been writing an article about short film distribution that has been soaking up all my free time and free brain. I love doing these things but I still get the terror every time because there is so much to say and so many different ways to say it.

I went to see Margaret Brown’s probing and beautifully shot The Power of Myths again yesterday at the IFC Center - it was the first night of Thom Powers’ Stranger Than Fiction Spring Season and it was great to see so many familiar faces, especially after my dismal attendance last season due to a crazy travel schedule. I’m really looking forward to seeing Ondi Timoner’s film about cults, Join Us, next week but the film I’m most excited to see again is James Marsh’s The Burger and the King: The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley. I saw this on telly in England many years ago and loved it then and have since become a huge Marsh fan after Wisconsin Death Trip and particularly the recent, glorious Man On Wire. I now have a picture of Philippe Petit dancing on the tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center pinned to the wall above my desk to remind me of the awe I felt watching Man on Wire. The human spirit man, it’s an amazing thing.

I have sadly failed to get to any screenings at New Directors/New Films and it looks like tickets for the Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize Winner Trouble the Water might be hard to come by. Dammit. Other lucky folk are off to Sarasota and Full Frame neither of which I have ever been to. Next year maybe. I’m not bitter. For now there is a mountain of work to attend to here in New York City and plenty of festival action coming up including HotDocs and Tribeca later this month.

In other news Cynopsis Digital picked us as their website of the day today. Very cool:

Shooting People is a stimulating, nurturing community site built to bring indie filmmakers together. New York and London-based lensers upload their work, solicit advice and share secrets on how to save on production costs or circumnavigate permit restrictions. Because the site is run by filmmakers and charges a modest $40 annual fee to join, it seems to be mostly populated by working professionals – nearly 35,000 of them. Founders Cath Le Couter and Jess Search will celebrate Shooters’ 10 year anniversary in November.

Meanwhile events in the world, yes the world outside film!, have been giving me sleepless nights. I recently read Peter Godwin’s extraordinary books about growing up in (Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa) and then returning to Zimbabwe (When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa) and have been following the elections there as much as is possible given the restricted press access.

And back to the ridiculous: You may have noticed that I have recently succumbed to the microblogging drug that is Twitter so follow me there if you really want to see what I am doing all day long (thinking about cleaning products in WholeFoods was one scintillating post!). Do it. You know you want to.

The first Cinema Eye event was held at the IFC Center on Tuesday night and it was a wonderful evening to be part of. The ceremony had just the right touch of rock and roll spirit (because lets face it award ceremonies can be deathly boring, especially when you have to eat food that tastes like it should only be served above 10,000 feet). Everyone seemed really grateful that the craft of documentary filmmaking was finally being recognized, and the need for Cinema Eye is clear when you consider that the American Society of Cinematographers do not even have an award for nonfiction. Looking around the room and seeing so many of my friends and colleagues who are so passionate about documentary did bring the expression “preaching to the choir” to mind but it just means that we need to make that choir bigger so that the producers, directors, cinematographers, editors, graphic designers and everybody else who plays such a vital role in bringing a film into the world get more recognition and so that great films like Manda Bala, The Monastery, Billy The Kid and The King of Kong are seen by more people in more cinemas and beyond.

My camera is on its last legs so this is the only picture I managed to get. The out of focus person in the middle is Jason Kohn picking up his award for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking for Manda Bala.

These are the award recepients:

Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking
MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET)
Directed by Jason Kohn
Produced by Joey Frank, Jared Goldman and Jason Kohn

Outstanding Achievement in Direction
Alex Gibney
TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE

Outstanding Achievement in Production
Seth Kanegis, Tomas Radoor & Mikael Rieks
GHOSTS OF CITE SOLEIL

Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography
Heloisa Passos
MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET)

Outstanding Achievement in Editing
Doug Abel, Jenny Golden & Andy Grieve
MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET)

Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Animation
The Team from Curious Pictures
CHICAGO 10

Outstanding International Feature
THE MONASTERY - MR. VIG & THE NUN
Directed by Pernille Rose Gronkjær
Produced by Sigrid Dyekjær

Outstanding Debut Feature
Jennifer Venditti
BILLY THE KID

Audience Choice Prize
THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS
Directed by Seth Gordon

Read more on indieWIRE.

There’s so much going on at the moment I feel rather gleefully overwhelmed. The Spirit Awards will be broadcast live on IFC tomorrow at 5pmET but I’m also going to be watching a webcast of the red carpet on IFC.com at 2.30pmET with commentary from SXSW’s Matt Dentler and IFC’s Alison Willmore.

And then of course on Sunday there’s some Oscar something or other happening. I’m going to find a friend with a bigger TV than mine and make some careless financial bets. It makes it more fun when “stakes is high.”

On a smaller scale but no less enjoyable, earlier in the week I went to the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series night that Michael Tully guest-curated with aplomb. He chose some films that I already know and love (The Zellner’s Foxy and the Weight of the World and the Duplass’s The Intervention) but it’s always a pleasure to watch old favorites with an audience. I finally got a chance to see Matthew Lessner’s clever and rather heartbreaking By Modern Measure and Josh Safdie’s beautiful We’re Going to the Zoo - and I reveled in the wonderful Weekend by Henrik Andersson, a film that makes me want to move to Scandinavia and wear a lot of beige. Check out upcoming screenings from the series - Barbes is always a fun place to drink beer and watch films on a Monday night.

On Tuesday I moderated an IFP Industry Connect panel on alternative distribution options which was very useful for me as I’m currently writing an article on that very subject. There was healthy debate amongst the panelists who brought a wealth of experience working on everything from: new models for theatrical (IFC Films with their day and date strategy), aggregating for iTunes (New Video), digital cinema ventures (Emerging Cinema), new web fundraising strategies (IndieGoGo), and online film sites (IndiePix). I’ll post more feedback in here shortly as the article comes together. It’s a subject I have been thinking about somewhat obsessively of late - for now there’s more discussion on this on the TOOLS blog.

Enjoy the film-tastic weekend!

It is the last Fall 07 Stranger Than Fiction screening tonight. Stranger Than Fiction is a documentary series curated by Thom Powers that has become a really fun Tuesday social for NYC doc folk. You get the chance to get a sneak preview of a documentary at the IFC Center followed by a Q&A with the director, followed by drinks somewhere nearby. Simple but effective. I haven’t had a chance to go to a lot of the Fall films this year but I took the opportunity to see Jessica Yu’s The Protagonist last week. I saw The Protagonist at Sundance earlier this year and was really moved by it so I was grateful for the chance to watch it again and it was wonderful to hear Yu talk about it afterwards. The Protagonist evolved when Yu was asked by Greg Carr and Noble Smith of The Carr Foundation to do a project on Euripides. Yu ran with the idea and made a film that, although it does involve Greek puppets reciting lines from Euripides, is mainly about agency, certainty, fate, and crisis in the lives of four contemporary men. The men are very different from each other - a former: German terrorist, evangelist, bank robber and martial arts student (who is also Yu’s husband) - but the similar trajectories of their stories become clear as the film progresses, and in this teasing out of the larger human themes I think Yu has done an incredible job.

Euripides is known for his female characters so it is interesting that the film became such a strong portrait of masculinity. Yu explained that they had originally looked for female characters too but that the women had always had an inkling that something was going wrong whereas the men just powered along blindly and then ran smack into a wall which caused the subsequent transformation.

I know I’m not explaining this very well but it is a film that you really need to see to understand. Luckily it is opening this Friday at the IFC Center so New York folk can catch it very soon.

Tonight Ira Glass and Chris Wilcha are coming to Stranger Than Fiction to preview clips from the TV version of This American Life and to talk about the differences between creating radio and television which I am very interested in since I am just a little bit obsessed with radio. I still think of radio as something incredibly old-fashioned, mysterious and glamorous and am constantly listening to BBC Radio 4 and NPR as I walk around the city or potter around my apartment.

Stranger Than Fiction is back in January for more documentaries and more hob-nobbing. Hooray!