Michael Moore on Wednesday, April 18 shared with a Full Frame crowd the rationale behind the Academy’s new Oscar rules for documentaries. Moore promises that the new rules will end the insular and corrupt old way of doing things, while giving appropriate attention to those filmmakers that truly deserve to be considered for an award.

Kevin Ritchie of Realscreen on Thursday, April 19 offered up a preview of Canada’s Hot Docs festival, set to run April 26 - May 6. Ritchie said 25 projects were selected from more than 100 submissions to participate in Hot Docs’ pitch program.

Realscreen on Wednesday, April 18 published a number of interviews with Canadian documentary filmmakers, who aired their concerns about cuts to the National Film Board of Canada on Indiewire. The CBC and other doc funding/broadcasting entities will also suffer budget cuts in the new fiscal year, with the effects of all these reductions yet to be seen.

There were a couple of recaps of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which ran in Durham, N.C., from April 12-15. Cliff Bellamy at the Herald-Sun examined the tribute program, which honored director and producer Stanley Nelson. And at ITVS’s Beyond the Box, Eric Martin wrote about some of the festival’s highlights, which included a panel examining lessons to be learned by the KONY 2012 phenomenon for feature-length films.

Indiewire on April 19 took a look at the film offerings available on Doc Club, the documentary-focused SundanceNOW VOD service. Doc Club, which is programmed by STF Artistic Director Thom Powers offers eight new titles a month for $3.99, or an annual subscription of $19.99. 

Powers has also been keeping busy as the director of the inaugural Montclair Film Festival, which got an overview from the New York Times’ Tammy La Gorge on Friday. The festival is set to run May 1-6, and will kick off with a screening of Julian Farino’s THE ORANGES, followed by a gala celebration at Montclair State University.

This week, POV programmer Yance Ford will be holding a Twitter chat to field questions about the television show’s submission process. Interested parties can participate by submitting questions via Twitter using the #docchat hashtag, or can follow along by going to http://tweetchat.com/room/docchat. The chat will take place Tuesday, April 25 at 7 p.m.

Director Doug Pray, who had the distinct honor of capturing Mix Master Mike’s melding of blues master Robert Johnson and a Dead Prez beat in his film SCRATCH, shared with the journal Flux his seven basic rules for documentary filmmaking. My favorite tip: “When [subjects] give you one word, un-editable answers, just act stupid and ask them what they’re talking about, as if you forgot.”

Oscar-winning filmmaker Jessica Yu spoke with Filmmaker Magazine about her latest project, LAST CALL AT THE OASIS, which examines the world’s worsening water crisis. Yu said she conceptualized the water crisis itself as the protagonist of her new project, and then tried to find human subjects that the audience could connect with.

Kevin Macdonald this week spoke with the IDA about his biopic MARLEY, and the difficulties he encountered getting some of his more reclusive subjects to speak on camera. “There’s also a lot of suspicion, particularly in Jamaica, to foreign crews coming in and wanting to do something about Bob Marley. You have to build their trust, and that takes a long time,” he said.

Heather McIntosh of the Documentary Site shared with POV her secrets about framing in documentary, illustrating her preferences with several stills taken from favorite films. “Framing is just one part of the discussion of art and cinema, and it can become part of the discussion of art and documentary,” McIntosh wrote.

Basil Tsiokos of the What (Not) to Doc blog wrote a nice overview of the docs offered at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Tsiokos said he was keeping an eye out for Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s OFF LABEL and Davy Chou’s GOLDEN SLUMBER, among other titles.

Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain on Wednesday, April 18 posted on the Tribeca Institute’s Future of Film blog a collection of her thoughts about cloud filmmaking. While not doc-specific, the post raises a host of interesting thoughts about the nature of cloud-computing and its potential applications for filmmakers of any stripe. 

Blackmagic, a company best known for developing camera peripherals, at NAB this week dropped the news that it would release the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. The news was head-turning enough to warrant takes from both the folks at POV and Filmmaker Magazine. We may see a crop of films shot on the camera over the next few years, as its MSRP is a very doc-friendly $2,995, and will take both Canon EF and Zeiss ZF lenses.

Christopher Campbell of the Documentary Channel Blog has this week’s theatrical releases, which include the aforementioned MARLEY.

As always, please send your tips and recommendations for the Memo .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Have a great week everybody!

Stranger Than Fiction: Laurens, what I love about this film is that so many of us know Jesse Owens from one line in a history book, and this brings so many other details to the story. What did Jesse Owens mean to you, and what attracted you to to the story?

Laurens Grant: I thought it would be the perfect challenge at the time, since I’m not a sports buff. I thought sports was a perfect gateway to address many themes in society and culture. And maybe some of the traditional and resonating stories of segregation, the African American migration north. Maybe this could be a different way to get at a similar story.

STF: As you started researching this story, what were the things that stood out or were surprising?

Grant: It was really hard and complicating in that he’s a male subject, and I think that era they weren’t very emotive. So it was a very internal subject. And I think if you’re a track runner, you’re whole process is almost internal. I think the biggest challenges were in taking some of those internal things and putting them on the screen. Certainly, his early life, what can we can show there? The whole point of the story is that he goes to the Olympics, but is there something we can show before that? It was scary to find out if there was going to be any archival footage of his early years. So after combing the Earth, we found more of his competitions and other bits and pieces. I also didn’t realize how well he was known before the Games. That added a different challenge, because he was already famous. It was unusual or unexpected challenges like that in terms of trying to tell the story.

Audience: How do you think it would have been different if Owens hadn’t been banned from athletic competitions after the Games?

Grant: In that circuit event era, it was all about competition and being in these meets. Since he couldn’t do that—and it really did extend internationally—he couldn’t compete with other Olympians, so he had to do these sort of exhibition meets. That was the era of traveling matches, traveling games, traveling sports events. So he found himself in that area until a little bit later when he could actually cash in.

Audience: What do you think Jesse can tell us today about African Americans in sports. The proliferation of endorsements in sports has clearly changed.

Grant: I think he had to invent that template, of what it means after your “expiration date.” Now we know that you must be a spokesman and get some endorsements. That wasn’t around at all, and I think he maybe helped put that into context—this is something you can actually have a career doing. I think some of the athletes today may be speaking out more. In his time, he couldn’t as much as perhaps he wanted to, although I don’t think he was a very confrontational person. Society has changed a lot, and athletes can and should be more vocal in terms of the world around them. What little Jesse did speaks volumes to this day. The kinship with Luz Long and some of those profound gestures, maybe they’re not done enough today. They have so much more latitude and gravitas to do things. And maybe that’s the takeaway.

STF: Since you mentioned Luz Long, do you know what became of him? How did he live through the war?

Grant: He was killed in the war. I couldn’t concretely find that the next day he had repercussions or anything like that. He was from a prominent family, but he was killed in the war. And years later Jesse Owens got in touch with his son, and kept up a relationship with him.

Audience: When he was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow, he said we have the best system in the world. This was before the Civil Rights movement. Did he really believe that, or is that just what he was supposed to say because it was the Cold War and he was being sent abroad?

Grant: I think both. He did hold onto the American Dream. Coming from Alabama to Cleveland, that was huge. He already survived that. I think he believed in if I work hard and put my nose to the grindstone I will get results. Maybe I won’t get all the results, but that’s okay because society is changing and it’s going to be better for the next generation. I think he really did believe that because, to him, he had a chance. He went to Ohio State. Yes, it was segregated but he got to go. He got to be on the team, he got a chance to win the medals. [Avery] Brundage was an S.O.B., but he got to be a goodwill ambassador.

Audience: Brundage had a long career. When Owens was named a goodwill ambassador, was Brundage still in power?

Grant: Brundage, he’s almost like the Hoover of the sports world. He just reigned supreme forever. I watched a lot of track films, narratives to documentaries. So many athletes, white and black, had run-ins with him. He enjoyed his power, and he kept it up until the 70s. So he was involved in the 1968 games in Munich, he was just a force, a one of a kind force.

STF: Am I right that Leni Riefenstahl filmed the 1936 Olympics for the film OLYMPIAD? How did she deal with Owens? That’s a part of the film I can’t remember.

Grant: Yes, she did that film and a number of films. She, in an interesting way, invented sports filmmaking, and sports coverage—all the different angles and dollies and digging trenches and stuff. But she had this very interesting fascination with Owens and the other black male athletes. [audience laughter] It was quite interesting. Later in life she went to Africa with a partner. So I think it was that she idolized them and has amazing camera angles on their bodies.

STF: So did you use any of that footage? Or did you purposely decide not to?

Grant: Intentionally and knowingly we did not use any of her footage. I guess that’s the good way to put it. It’s all contingent to what did she shoot or not shoot. Seventy-five years later all different people are claiming ownership. But I think her cinematography is so noted, and what she was doing was so stylized. What I was trying to do was put the viewer in the moment, almost like news footage. But she did capture so many of the events, because she was there and had six cameras. But it’s a bit contentious, I guess, who owns the footage, but the Olympics claim ownership.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]

News last week that director Laura Poitras (MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY and THE OATH) has been targeted for extra scrutiny by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials when returning to the US drew the concern of a number of documentary filmmakers and other free press supporters. The board of the Cinema Eye Honors on Monday, April 9 issued a statement decrying the treatment Poitras has received at the hands of the DHS. The statement read, in part: “Nonfiction filmmakers perform a vital role in a democratic society, serving as observers and investigators of the world around us.  It is unacceptable for any American nonfiction filmmaker or journalist to be treated in this manner.  They must be able to return to their own country without fear of arrest or fear that their work product will be seized, solely because they are investigating or chronicling subject matter that may be sensitive or controversial.” Among those who expressed support for the the Cinema Eye Honors board statement were D.A. Pennebaker, Michael Moore and Albert Maysles.

At the New York Times, Stephen Holden previewed the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs April 18-29. Holden highlighted Jeroen van Velzen’s WAVUMBA as a film to keep an eye out for.

Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki on Monday, April 9 reflected on his 2003 film CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS in an interview with Indiewire, noting that he believed that the film was now due for a sequel.

Over at the Documentary Channel blog, Christopher Campbell spoke with director Mark Meatto (HOW TO GROW A BAND) about the influence that Richard Leacock had on him, as well as his attempts to play with the conventions of cinema verite.

The Washington Post interviewed Judith Hetherington, mother of the late director Tim Hetherington (RESTREPO) about her son’s film and photojournalistic work in advance of his one-year death anniversary, on April 20. Hetherington was killed while covering the overthrow of Col. Muamar Qaddafi by Libyan rebels. The first major posthumous solo gallery exhibition of Hetherington’s photo work began April 12 at the Yossi Milo Gallery at 245 10th Avenue in New York City, and is set to run until May 19.

Sean Gandert of Paste Magazine on April 7 released a lists of nine docs that changed the world. Topping the list was the Errol Morris classic THE THIN BLUE LINE, while Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda piece TRIUMPH OF THE WILL took the final spot.

The New York Times Media Decoder blog on April 9 reported details of their analysis of a block of Motion Picture Association of America data, finding that independent films were being released in larger numbers, but with exposure to smaller audiences overall. Much of the increase in distribution was driven by two companies, Magnolia Pictures and IFC Films.

Julia Halperin of Artinfo this week issued two posts examining the recent wave of documentaries about artists, and spoke with a number of the films’ directors. Among those films examined in the write-ups were AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY and GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING.

Patricia Aufderheide, the head of the Center for Social Media at American University, shared with the Interactive Documentary Association a great, comprehensive recap of her experiences at this year’s South by Southwest festival. Aufderheide participated in a number of panels about new modes of interactive doc/multiplatform storytelling.

Indiewire on Monday, April 9 took a look at the Mozilla Foundation’s Living Docs project, asking a Mozilla rep questions about its Popcorn.js HTML-coding platform that has already been used as the basis for several interactive doc projects.

Interactive fever has also taken root at the Tribeca Film Festival, which announced that its Interactive Day would take place on April 23, and feature a number of panel discussions with content creators and programmers.

At Filmmaker Magazine, David Leitner has a great recap of large sensor cameras that were released in the last year, including the Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon C300 and the Sony NEX-FS100.

Christopher Campbell at the Documentary Channel Blog has this week’s theatrical releases.

This week Stranger Than Fiction is hosting the Stanley Nelson-penned doc JESSE OWENS, which had its premiere this weekend at the Full Frame Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Director/producer Laurens Grant will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A, so get your tickets now. You can find more information and purchase tickets here.

As always, please send your tips and recommendations for the Monday Memo .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Have a great week everybody!

Stranger Than Fiction: How did you and Victoria come to this topic? What drew you to it in the first place?

Karin Hayes: We came to this topic knowing nothing about it. I had not looked into corporate taxes before in my life. Our executive director, Charles Davidson, he had been following the issue with a passion and was very interested in how offshore tax havens affected the global economy. So he approached Vicky and asked her to write a book. She said, let’s do a film, we can do that much more quickly and reach more people, perhaps. He said, okay, I’ve never done a film before. So he said go ahead, and that’s how we started.

STF: Lee, what does it mean to have a film like this that brings all of these disparate elements together?

Lee Sheppard: It’s fascinating for us, because I work for a publication that talks to policy makers and talks to tax professionals, but it does not talk to ordinary people most of the time. So it’s nice to be able to relate this all. It was actually a dream of our founder, 40 years ago, to be able to communicate with ordinary people. Actually, he was very exercised when he founded the thing that oil companies were not paying their taxes. But they were sort of the tip of a large iceberg. But it was always his dream to be able to communicate this kind of thing, but it is hard. What this film does is boil down a lot of difficult concepts to nice graphics and nice shooting in an understandable and interesting format.

STF: Where do you think this issue is in an election year? Is it going to make the radar of this election, or not?

James Henry: It’s interesting. Just a month ago Obama announced that he was seeking more corporate tax cuts. And we have the Republicans, of course, proposing the zero percent tax rate as we saw in the film. Two weeks after Obama announced his plan, the UK announced another corporate tax cut. And Japan just announced another tax cut. So this is turning into a kind of global arms race. And its heading toward an end state where the state has to rely on taxes on labor and on sales, unavoidable taxes. And the corporate elite and shareholders are able to avoid taxes using offshore devices and lots of other devices. That’s not the kind of society we really want to end up with. I’m happy that this film was made, because it’s hard to talk about taxes, you’d rather watch paint dry. People’s eyes glaze over. And there was an incredible connection made with the US Uncut people that allowed this issue, which is really fundamental to the future of our democracy—the battle for our government that’s now going on. People who see the film, I think their eyes are opening up, and they’re thinking that this is not just boring.

Jesse Drucker: I’m not sure if this is an issue that’s ready to take off in terms of the general public being aware of it, or it being part of the campaign. But I do think that the parallel to the Occupy Wall Street movement to me is extremely interesting. James actually summed this up very well near the end of the film. I think a lot of people in this room, like me, are fairly cynical about the ability of the public to be able to affect a political debate. As someone who has written a little over the years about income inequality, this was an issue that, until six or eight months ago, you were hard-pressed to read much about outside the pages of Pravda, maybe. What the Occupy Wall Street movement has shown is that when lots of people take to the streets for long periods of time, it really can make a difference. It’s not clear to me what’s going to happen six months from now in terms of policy around income inequality, but it is part of the debate now every single day. It’s not that it just wasn’t this much of a part of the debate before, it wasn’t part of the debate at all. And now it’s a huge part of the debate. It is an interesting lesson that shows if there’s some kind of popular awareness of these issues and there is a mass protest that there actually is a chance that it could be a part of policy discussions.

Audience: Could you talk a little about transaction taxes, and if that is a way to go?

Sheppard: That is something we need to do for a variety of reasons. The Europeans are doing it now, they’ve got a European Union plan, and France is going to introduce one. There are little financial transaction taxes around the world. Oddly enough, some of them are in the countries that are regarded as very friendly to securities trading like Britain, Singapore and Hong Kong. What it is is a teensy weensy tax every time somebody trades a security. It is collected at the clearing house. I’m completely for it, I’ve written articles advocating it. It’s a very efficient way to collect revenue, because you just clip it off at the clearing house when you do the transaction. The other thing is that it would discourage a lot of disturbing practices that are going on in the securities markets, like high-frequency trading, because it basically raises the cost of trading by a little bit. But it’s a thing that you can adopt pretty quickly. We actually have one here, a little one that funds the SEC. It’s a very doable thing for revenue and for reasons of fixing some things that are going on in the financial markets that are not a good idea. Does it take care of deficit-type problems? Or can you pay for occupying Afghanistan or something with it? No, not unless you go higher on it. If you want to take care of the deficit right now repeal the Bush tax cuts. A lot of the deficit is attributable to that.

Henry: The so-called Tobin Tax, it’s basically known as the Robin Hood tax. The people that are opposed to it are the big banks. The top six banks in the United States control about 85% of the international currency markets, including those in the UK and abroad. When Europe started talking about introducing this thing, it’s a perfect example of the politics of this. Treasury Secretary Geithner flew all around Europe lobbying against this tax. The worst thing in the world would be to have the Europeans go off on their own and try to adopt this tax alone. There are a lot of things that we could do with the tax system that require global cooperation. But these corporations are the only ones that are effectively organized across borders, and that’s one issue we have to address.

Drucker: There’s a lot of very complicated things that need to be done, but then there are simple things like letting the Bush tax cuts expire, which would raise a lot of revenue. One of the difficult things in this area is that it’s of tremendous public interest, but if you look at a lot of public interest areas like the environment or poverty or reproductive rights, there are, with varying degrees of public funding, fairly well organized public interest groups and lobbys in Washington and around the country that are on the public’s side. There’s virtually no funded public interest lobby in Washington on tax equity issues. There’s Citizens for Tax Justice, but it’s a tiny organization with virtually no funding. There really isn’t an organized lobby on the other side of transfer pricing. The only people that really understand these issues and lobby on them are on one side, for better or for worse. That’s a very important issue, and maybe one that will change with a film like this.

Audience: Do you think there’s a limit on focusing just on the issue of tax evasion? Isn’t it more of a systemic problem? One of the thing about Occupy was that it recognized the fact that what’s driving these corporations are shareholder expectations. Wouldn’t a more transformative view take on more complicated issues?

Hayes: That’s an interesting point. With the film, there’s so many different levels to the issue and to the problem that we bring some of them up, like corporate money in politics. But in terms of exploring all the different levels of it, it’s a much longer conversation. Hopefully the film can serve as a jumping off point to talk about some of those things.

Sheppard: The idea that corporations are only answerable to shareholders is actually a relatively new idea. It only dates from the late 80s when some business professors came up with it and leveraged buyout guys ran with it. We do have to get back to a notion that if you’re a big, giant company you serve something else. Stuff like rescuing General Motors actually helps focus this. Because you say, why did we do it? Well, because this thing had a lot of employees and was responsible to a lot of communities, and we couldn’t let it go down. But defining that thing to somebody other than its shareholders—to its communities and employees—is necessary. There is hope for us, but it takes bad economic times to get there. Bad economic times also focuses attention on taxes too, because in good times, everybody thinks they’re going to get rich and everybody thinks they’re going to be one of the people who pays only 15% taxes or something like that. Tax is the main relationship that people have with their government. Tax is also the main relationship that corporations have with their government. And corporations have a government charter—a state government charter, admittedly. But they exist only because governments let them exist.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]

Salon’s Glen Greenwald on Sunday, April 8 issued a report detailing the harassment director Laura Poitras (THE OATH and MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY) faces from Department of Homeland Security officials every time she returns from traveling overseas. Greenwald writes: “She has had her laptop, camera and cellphone seized, and not returned for weeks, with the contents presumably copied. On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship. Her credit cards and receipts have been copied on numerous occasions.” Greenwald added that Poitras has refrained from speaking out on her problems for fear it might subject her to more difficulties from the authorities.

Chicago doc production house Kartemquin Films on Monday, April 2 posted an announcement on its website that a steering committee for the formerly ad hoc PBS Needs Indies movement had been formed, in response to PBS’s scheduling changes of doc shows Independent Lens and POV. The Independent Documentary Association (IDA) also announced its support for the steering committee, which was populated by a number of filmmakers and other documentary professionals. The committee said its first step was to “begin planning for public events that can showcase the critical importance of public-purpose programming to public television and to the nation’s media ecology.”

The University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication on Wednesday, April 4 announced the winners of the prestigious George Foster Peabody Awards in electronic media. Among the winners were Stanley Nelson’s FREEDOM RIDERS, Jamila Wignot’s TRIANGLE FIRE, and Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s STONEWALL UPRISING, all of which were produced in coordination with WGBH’s American Experience. Also receiving awards were ITVS films MY PERESTROIKA, by Robin Hessman;  BHUTTO, by Johnny O’Hara; and WHO KILLED CHEA VICHEA, by Bradley Cox.

The New York Times on Monday, April 2 reported that Robert Redford was producing a two-hour television documentary, ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN REVISITED, for the Discovery Channel. Redford followed up that news by announcing the next day that he had launched a new company, Sundance Productions, that would create both fiction and non-fiction projects, largely focusing on television and multimedia platforms.

At the What (Not) to Doc blog, Basil Tsiokos has an overview of the Full Frame Documentary Festival, set to take place April 12-15. The festival also listed a number of panel discussions it was hosting.

At POV’s blog, Tom Roston took aim at the notion that documentary filmmakers could not also be entertainers, relying on a transcript of a panel discussion held on the subject prior to the True/False Film Festival.

Also at POV, Adam Schartoff of Filmwax fame had a conversation with director Jay Bulger, whose BEWARE OF MR. BAKER took home the Grand Jury prize for best documentary at South by Southwest this year.

The New York Times’ John Anderson this week provided a breakdown of Kevin Macdonald’s research process in the making of MARLEY, the biographical documentary of reggae superstar Bob Marley.

Fans of Stanley Kubrick will be rewarded by a trip to the Open Culture blog, which took a look at the auteur’s earliest films, which just happen to be docs. The post makes clear that, while his filmmaking talents were innate, his sense for business was not.

At the ITVS Beyond the Box blog, filmmaker Musa Syeed (A SON’S SACRIFICE, BRONX PRINCESS) shared his experiences playing with non-linear storytelling techniques, efforts that culminated in the project 30 MOSQUES.

This weekend, David Gelb’s JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI surpassed the $1 million mark, after being in release for five weeks.

Christopher Campbell of The Documentary Channel Blog has this week’s theatrical releases, which include Morgan Spurlock’s COMIC-CON EPISODE IV.

We’re still on the hunt for your favorite Twitter accounts to follow, so please send them to @GuerrillaFace, or email them .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

This week, Stranger Than Fiction kicks off the Spring Season with a screening of WE’RE NOT BROKE, a film by Karin Hayes and Victoria Bruce that examines the techniques that corporations use to avoid paying their taxes. Hayes and Bruce will be in attendance for a Q&A following the film. For more info or to buy tickets, go here.

As always, please e-mail any tips or recommendations for the Memo here. Have a great week!