Sarah Polley’s STORIES WE TELL continues to draw the attention of the press, and for good reason. Germain Lussier of /Film (that’s not a typo) interviewed Polley, as did Nick Allen of The Scorecard Review. Tom Roston of the POV blog weighed in on the film, while NPR covered its release.

Cannes already seemed to be heating up doc acquisitions on the French Riveria. Realscreen’s Kelly Anderson reported that HBO had acquired US and Canadian television rights for James Toback’s new film SEDUCED AND ABANDONED, while Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Times had coverage of the same deal. Gregg Kilday of The Hollywood Reporter had the news that Phase 4 had nabbed all U.S. and Canadian rights for Lucy Walker’s film THE CRASH REEL. And Geoffrey Macnab of Screen Daily reported that Attraction Distribution had won worldwide rights to Hot Docs award winner DRAGON GIRLS from director Inigo Westmeier.

This week Stranger Than Fiction is hosting its last film of the Spring season, ON THE ROPES by directors Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein. The film follows the lives of three boxers struggling to succeed at The Bed-Stuy Boxing Center in Brooklyn. Morgen and Burstein will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening, which will take place on Tuesday, May 21 at the IFC Center in Manhattan. For more information or to purchase tickets please go here.

This week the doc world lost member William Miles, a self-taught filmmaker who made work about the history of black America. Bruce Weber penned an obit for Miles at the New York Times.

This week Basil Tsiokos had an overview of docs screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival at his What (Not) to Doc blog. Tsiokos also turned out a couple of Tribeca recaps, one about the festival’s gala screenings and another about spotlight films.

Shane Salerno’s in-the-works J.D. Salinger doc SALINGER earned some ink from Britain’s Guardian newspaper this week, with Paul Harris and Charlotte Higgins providing the coverage.

Kevin Ritchie of Realscreen reported that Dylan Mohan Gray’s film FIRE IN THE BLOOD had won the Feature Documentary Award at this year’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver.

In his weekly Docutopia post on the SundanceNOW blog, Anthony Kaufman wrote on the trend of celebrity driven docs, and how they stacked up to those driven by lesser known subjects that touched on deeper themes. Kaufman also wrote on the short film MY NEIGHBORHOOD by director Julia Bacha for the Reel Politik blog at Indiewire.

Film critics turned out a number of doc reviews this week. At The Film Stage Nathan Bartlebaugh took on Jessica Oreck’s Aaatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys. Writing for the Film School Rejects site, Christopher Campbell considered THE FRUIT HUNTERS from director Yung Chang, while Andy Webster of The New York Times awarded Michael Singh’s film VALENTINO’S GHOST with a Critics Pick.

Up north, Jay Cheel turned out a podcast covering this year’s Hot Docs festival for The Documentary Blog. Marc Glassman also covered Hot Docs, but for the International Documentary Association website. And Adam Benzine of Realscreen reported that this year’s Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) would honor director Marcel Ophüls (THE SORROW AND THE PITY) in November.

The Boston Globe’s Books section interviewed filmmaker Ken Burns, sussing out his taste in the written word.

This week the New York Times published an Op-Doc from filmmaker Stephen Maing about the work of Chinese blogger Zhang Shihe.

At the Documentary Channel blog, Christopher Campbell highlighted BIDDER 70 and STATE 194 as docs getting theatrical releases worth keeping an eye out for and, in a separate post, THE FRUIT HUNTERS and BECOMING TRAVIATA. Campbell also noted several new noteworthy doc trailers, including one for SUDDENLY, the film that profiles young Harlem rapper A$AP Rocky.

ProPublica’s Tom Detzel published a post on the results of the organization’s participation in the recent Tribeca Hacks hackathon. The event yielded the online work “Your Hospital May Be Hazardous to Your Health.

And the MIT Open Doc Lab kept its new digital storytelling interviews for Filmmaker Magazine going with one with D. Fox Harrell, Associate Professor of Digital Media in the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.

At the i-Docs website, Judith Aston considered the commonality of linearity found in several successful online and interactive documentary projects. Sandra Gaudenzi also provided a recap of WebDox 2013 for i-Docs.

The Tribeca Film Institute published video from this year’s TFI Interactive, specifically a very funny speech from IDFA Doclab creator Casper Sonnen.

That’s it for this week. Remember to send tips and recommendations for the Memo via e-mail here, or on Twitter to @GuerrillaFace. Thanks and have a great week!

Ground was broken this week on New York City’s first documentary-specific theater at DCTV in Manhattan. Cristina A. Gonzalez of Indiewire had details on the event, as did Stewart Nusbaumer at Filmmaker Magazine and Jennifer Merin of About.com. Kelly Anderson covered the news event for Realscreen.

News on Hot Docs continued to make its way online, as writers loosed their listicles on the festival. Writing for Indiewire, Basil Tsiokos highlighted eight films from the festival’s forum to keep an eye out for. Tom Roston shared seven reasons to love Hot Docs on the POV blog. At Realscreen, Adam Benzine provided a full recap of the festival, while Robert Greene continued the discussion on whether we are in a documentary golden age at Hammer To Nail.

This week Stranger Than Fiction is hosting a screening of FOLLOW THE LEADER from director Jonathan Goodman Levitt on Tuesday, May 14 at 8pm at the IFC Center. The film is is a real-life coming-of-age story of three traditional American boys with Presidential dreams. Goodman Levitt will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening. For more information or to purchase tickets please go here.

On Wednesday, the Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions program at the Museum of Modern Art kicked off. At his What (Not) to Doc blog, Basil Tsiokos provided an overview of the series, which runs until the end of May. Anthony Kaufman also took on the film program for his weekly Docutopia post at the SundanceNOW blog.

YouTube launched its much anticipated paid channel test program this week, with Barry Walsh of Realscreen reporting the details. Alex Ben Block of The Hollywood Reporter also reported that Cinedigm had launched a paid YouTube channel for its Docurama brand as part of the effort.

The New York Times also launched its own online doc effort, this one in conjunction with nonprofit doc outfit Retro Report. Adario Strange of PC Mag as well as Laura Hazard Owen of paidContent reported on the news.

Barry Walsh of Realscreen had details on the lineup at this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, which includes PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER among others. Someone over at The Knowledge Bulletin took the time to interview Doc/Fest programmer Hussein Currimbhoy on the films that move his spirit.

Michael Ciepley of the New York Times wrote on the challenges facing director Shane Salerno and The Weinstein Company regarding their doc SALINGER, about the reclusive author J.D. Salinger.

Alex Gibney this week fired a broadside at a few of those who have criticized his film WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS; Mike Hogan had the details for The Huffington Post.

Back at Realscreen, Kelly Anderson interviewed I WILL BE MURDERED director Justin Weber, whose film recently premiered at Hot Docs.

VENUS AND SERENA earned a review from A.O. Scott of the New York Times. And over at the Documentary Channel blog, Christopher Campbell interviewed directors Maiken Baird and Michelle Major on their film.

At About.com Jennifer Merin had details on Kartemquin Film’s Spring Showcase, set to take place on May 19 in Chicago. Kartemquin was also in the news this week after Steve James’ film THE INTERRUPTERS was named the recipient for the Malott Prize for Recording Community Activism.

Basil Tsiokos had his regular tally of festival overviews for his What (Not) to Doc blog. This week’s offerings included one for Warsaw’s Planete + Doc festival, as well as one on DOK.fest Munich.

Wendy Mitchell of Screen Daily reported that Joshua Oppenheimer would follow up his well-regarded film THE ACT OF KILLING with another similarly themed one titled THE LOOK OF SILENCE.

Writing for the New York Times, Tom Roston checked in with Oscilloscope Laboratories to see how the distro outfit was fairing at the death anniversary of founder Adam Yauch.

At the Wall Street Journal’s India Realtime blog, Aarti Virani wrote a nice piece on Nisha Pahuja’s film THE WORLD BEFORE HER.

In a piece considering the rise of direct distribution, Alison Willmore of Indiewire noted that documentaries were leading the pack. Willmore also interviewed Ted Hope on his direct distribution labs, hosted at the San Francisco Film Festival.

Writing for Indiewire’s ReelPolitik column, Anthony Kaufman detailed the attacks waged against the film AFTER TILLER and its subjects.

At Filmmaker Magazine, Nick Dawson had the details on this year’s BAMcinemaFest, which features a number of great docs.

Bryan Abrams of The Credits interviewed director Jamie Meltzer on his new project FREEDOM FIGHTERS and a number of other subjects.

Back at Filmmaker Magazine, Jessica Vale shared a story of how she was stymied in her efforts to make a documentary in Liberia about a medical mission.

Brian Glasier of Baristanet recapped a Montclair Film Festival panel featuring Michael Moore, Lucy Walker, Bill Siegel and Dawn Porter.

Jaya Mahajan had a great piece on the making of the interactive doc Bear 71 at her blog, Factual For Asia. And the POV blog republished an interview with Loc Dao and Hugues Sweeney of the NFB originally conducted by Hal Siegel for StoryCode.

Filmmaker Magazine published the latest installment of its New Digital Storytellers interviews conducted by the MIT Open Documentary Lab, this one with Katerina Cizek, currently the director of the NFB’s HIGHRISE project.

The Open Doc Lab also announced that it was launching a Research Forum to foster discussion and debate on new documentary arts.

That’s it for this week. Please send any tips or recommendations for the Memo via e-mail here, or via Twitter to @GuerrillaFace. Thanks and have a great week.

Stone joined STF’s Thom Powers for a post-screening Q&A, featuring contributions from surprise guests in the audience.

Stranger Than Fiction: Robert, your very first film, a few decades ago, was Radio Bikini, about the atomic bomb. You’ve made other films about the environmental movement. Can you talk about your own process of thinking around this subject?

Robert Stone: It’s been a long journey. The inspiration to make this film was in the people in this film. Their personal journeys on this really mirror my own in a great many ways. I was never an activist like they were, so I wasn’t protesting and marching against power plants or anything like that, but I very much came out of the whole anti-nuclear thing and have been an environmentalist my whole life. The first time I ever picked up a camera was to do a little film for my seventh grade science class on the first Earth Day. This is in my blood.

I’ll just tell you a little bit about the spark for this film. I made a film called Earth Days, which was a history of the environmental movement. It was a closing night film at Sundance in ’09. It played the Eccles Theatre; like 1500 people were there, and it was a big thing. I came out and started doing the Q&A, and somebody in the front row raised their hand and asked me what my position on nuclear power was. Like, totally out of the blue. I said that my position had evolved, but I wanted to bring out Stewart Brand who’s also in that movie, because Stewart has a lot of interesting things to say. He came out, and he made a five-minute really impassioned plea for nuclear power from an environmental perspective, after everyone had seen this movie just revering him as an environmental legend, which he is. And the place just went nuts. I had never seen anything like it. It was insane. Like, nobody wanted to talk about Earth Days anymore; it’s like, “Let’s talk about nuclear power.” It wasn’t in a bad way – they were just fascinated.

I’d already come around on this from reading Stewart’s book, and I’d talk about it with people. When I’d go to dinner parties, people would ask me, like they always do, “What are you working on?” Usually that’s a two-minute conversation; this topic became the topic of the dinner party. Nuclear power. (laughter) So there’s something special. It’s the elephant in the room. I think this is the elephant in the room about a whole host of environmental issues and climate change and, really, once you get your head around it, kind of reorients your thinking.

STF: I want to ask you about Helen Caldicott, who, for a long time, has been a revered figure of the Left. I wonder what your perspective on her is.

Stone: Well, she was revered for me, too. She did amazing things in her campaign against nuclear weapons. I think where she’s gone off the rails is that she completely, completely conflates nuclear weapons with nuclear power, to the point where she sees it as an absolute abomination, just like Right to Life zealots see abortion. There’s no equivocation; it’s just evil and must be eradicated from the Earth in every possible way, and she’ll say or do anything to achieve that. It’s kind of sad, because she had a really positive impact, once upon a time.

Audience: I have a question about radiation. I lived in a place where atomic bombs were dropped, and there was always talk about how there was increased radiation there and increased cancer risk. So I’m wondering if there’s any doubt that radiation causes cancer.

Stone: No. There’s no doubt. Radiation, above a certain level, will cause cancer. Below a certain level, it apparently doesn’t cause cancer. It’s really what that level is. If you sit out in the sun, you’re getting radiation from the sun, and you’re going to get melanoma. The point is, at what level?

The levels that we’re talking about in relation to nuclear energy are so low, they don’t even rise above, for the most part, the variations that we get in natural background radiation in various parts of the world. That’s why I went around the world with a Geiger counter, so I could show the relative risk, that’s never, ever portrayed in the news. It’s always just this absolute thing – this thing’s just beeping, and it’s terrible. (laughter)

Audience: As an ex-science major in college, I really loved this film, but since this film’s message so goes against the “mainstream” message, what’s your experience dealing with distribution? Are there a lot of broadcasters signing on to broadcast this?

Stone: Well, we’ll see, won’t we? I’ve been told for four years that nobody will ever go see this movie, ’cause there’s no audience for this movie. I don’t believe that, and it remains to be seen. We’re going out pretty wide in movie theaters around the country. We’re opening in New York on June 12 at the Sunshine, going into 25 cities on June 14, and heading out from there. CNN Films has picked it up for national broadcast in November, and then we’re going into 25 countries on iTunes in December. So we’re going wide. I’ve been doing a college tour around the country, zipping around, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. People are really digging it.

Most of the environmental films – and I’ve made a couple myself – are very depressing. They’re trying to raise a level of alarm for the general public to wake up to the problem of climate change, which is extremely real and was what motivated me to make this film. Where we get into trouble is when we discuss the solutions to climate change. What I’ve tried to do with this film is make a hopeful film that has an actual solution that is viable and something that we can implement now to reduce CO2 emissions within the next few decades. I know there are a lot of questions about “Should the world look like it does in that last shot? Should we use so much energy?” Well, we are going to use that much energy. “Should population be so high?” I don’t want to live in a world of nine billion people, but it’s going happen.

Audience: I was captivated by the image of the Shoreham control room, and there was the coffee cup. Was that really there?

Stone: That was really there. It was not staged. Gwyneth Cravens is right here, and she was with me! (laughter) Raise your hand, Gwyneth.

Gwyneth Cravens: He’s telling the truth. (laughter) There was garbage in the place and an old coffee cup and rusty things…

Stone: …old 1970s phone books.

Cravens: Yeah. It was like going into a tomb. (laughter)

Stone: Yeah. Nothing was staged, not even the bananas.

Audience: I’d just like to say that it’s nice to look into the future and to have this nice clean fantasy, but we have 400 power plants from the old world that we have to deal with. But that’s not the question. (laughter) What happened at Yucca Mountain? I wanted to see what’s inside there. What happened?

Stone: Nothing’s inside there. What happened was the federal government is, by law, obligated to take care of all the nuclear waste and provide a repository for that. There’s been a political hold up in doing that, I think in part because a lot of people who are against nuclear power really don’t want to see a solution to this, because if there was a solution to the nuclear waste problem, it would take away one of the biggest arguments against nuclear power. So there’s been a lot of opposition to ever using this place as a repository. Also, a lot of that comes from the idea that we have to store this stuff for 100,000 years, and who can project what a location is going to be like for 100,000 years? But I think that what’s been pointed out in this film is that this stuff isn’t waste, it’s fuel. It’s fuel for the next generation of plants. So we’re going to use this stuff for the next generation and we’re probably only going to need to store this stuff for a few hundred years, which is a totally doable thing. But we do need to take it somewhere and stop leaving it in pools and other dry-cast storage and move it somewhere.

One thing I would point out: you know the image of the football field of all the nuclear waste in the United States? That material could power everything in the United States – transportation, absolutely everything – for 1,000 years. In the United States. Would power the United States for 1,000 years, just that material, without ever mining a gram of uranium ever again. Great Britain has enough to power their whole country for 500 years. So this stuff is not waste, it’s fuel, and it should not actually be buried for 100,000 years.

Audience: But couldn’t a nuclear plant become a nuclear weapon? I mean, in a war, in acts of terrorism, in acts of sabotage, natural disasters?

Stone: That’s a great question. Can a nuclear power plant become a nuclear weapon? It’s actually a very different process. A nuclear weapon is 90% pure uranium and is contained. The whole process is to contain this very volatile material. A nuclear reactor is the opposite. It’s 3% pure, and the purpose is to expand. It’s an open system; it’s not compressed. So a nuclear power plant cannot blow up. Chernobyl blew up from a steam explosion; Fukushima blew up because of a hydrogen explosion. These were not nuclear explosions. So, in effect, no, a nuclear power plant can’t become a nuclear weapon.

And in terms of using a nuclear power plant to make a nuclear weapon, no country in the world has ever actually done that. India kind of did it with an experimental reactor that was given by the Canadians back in the ’50s as part of the whole Atoms for Peace thing, but really, all you have to do is look at Iran. Iran has a nuclear power plant, Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, but how are they trying to make their weapon? They’re taking raw uranium and spinning it in centrifuges, because the material in the reactor is not useful to them to make a bomb. So they are very different things, but, you know, as is stated in the film, if you know how to make a nuclear reactor, you will definitely have the knowledge to make a nuclear bomb. But that knowledge is already out there, widely available around the world.

STF: Someone earlier asked about growing up near a site that felt like it had a lot of radiation around it, and certainly there’s a lot of anecdotal feeling that in areas around nuclear reactors, people believe there are higher rates of cancer. That’s said about areas of Long Island; we showed a film here last year, The Atomic States of America, which had a lot of credible people advancing arguments like that. What is your take on those kinds of beliefs?

Stone: Well, I don’t know. I have no independent determination whether any of this is true. And neither do you and neither does anybody. We’re not scientists. The only way you can figure this stuff out is by relying on peer-reviewed consensus and scientific research, where they’ve done large-scale epidemiological studies and figured out whether the cancer rate is elevated over here versus over there. They’ve done that with Chernobyl, and the conclusions are rather surprising. You’re not going to get it by walking down the street and saying, “Hey, do you have cancer?” 20% of us die of cancer and 30% of us will get cancer. That’s a statistic that’s shocking and most of us don’t want to think about. We want to think that there’s some reason for that.

So it’s only natural that if there’s a power plant down the road or something that you might attribute to causing that, you’re going to say, “Well, that caused it.” Making a film about that and interviewing people…I find it exploitative and unhelpful. It’s exactly what the news media does all the time. Fear sells. It’s always about that, because it’s an emotional thing. We’re hardwired to react to things that scare us. We’re not hardwired to react to things that don’t scare us.

Kevin Rafferty: Hey, Thom.

STF: Yeah. Kevin Rafferty…

Stone: Kevin Rafferty! Who made Atomic Cafe!

STF: …at the same time Robert was making Radio Bikini, yeah?

Stone: No, I wouldn’t have been able to make Radio Bikini if it wasn’t for Kevin Rafferty. (laughter)

Rafferty: You mentioned an elephant in the room. And to me, the elephant in the room of this whole issue is bad people who want to do bad things to other people. And you didn’t mention that at all in your movie. I mean, the IRA used to kidnap bank managers’ families and try to snip off the little daughter’s fingers unless they gave them all their money!

Stone: Yes? (laughter)

Rafferty: If I wanted to do something bad, let’s say to New York City or wherever, there are so many opportunities for this. It’s like a second amendment issue. I mean, you can get a rifle, or you can get a 50-caliber machine gun, or you can get a tank, but can you get a dirty bomb? Does the second amendment cover that? (laughter) There are all these people who want to do bad things, and here’s all this stuff sitting in the parking lot, and it seems to me there are opportunities there for doing bad things.

Stone: Yeah?

Rafferty: You didn’t mention that in your movie. That, to me…

Stone: Well, people are doing…I mean, you and I were both here in New York on 9/11. People are gonna do bad things without necessarily breaking into a nuclear power plant and drilling a whole into a four-foot piece of concrete, through three feet of steel and taking out some piece of radioactive…I mean, if you ever did that, you’d have the entire US Army after you.

The thing that we need to be concerned about is the weapons-grade plutonium that is loose in the world, largely as a result from the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it’s this material – not the stuff that’s sitting in nuclear reactors in the United States or other countries – that we need to be worried about. In fact, as is pointed out in the film, the only way that you can get rid of that stuff, remove it from the face of the Earth is you either bury it underground – which gives you another security problem – or you put it in a faster reactor and you turn it into electricity.

Interestingly, in Great Britain, it looks like they are going to be the first country to have built an IFR. General Electric has commercialized the IFR; they call it the Prism Reactor, and Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are actually behind this, ’cause they want to get rid of this weapon-grade plutonium, and Britain has the only way to do it. So actually, nuclear power can alleviate some of the concerns that we all have about terrorists getting their hands on this dangerous material.

Terrorists can do all kinds of things. They can plant a pressure cooker. It doesn’t need to be this big, sophisticated thing to cause huge damage. Or they can run a plane into the Hoover Dam. What are you going to do? You end up like Dick Cheney, living in a cave, if you just go on with that kind of thinking.

Audience: I don’t know if you really answered Kevin’s question, so let me ask it another way. What would be the impact of a terrorist attack on Indian Point?

Stone: I can tell you exactly that. Sandia Labs has actually done a test where they ran a jet into the reinforcement cement wall, which is exactly the same as a containment dome. And what happened was – I’m gonna put it on the website; I actually thought of using it in the film, but I didn’t, since the film could only be 90 minutes and I didn’t have time – what happened was the jet just disintegrated. It penetrated an inch. It penetrated an inch.

Audience: So you’re saying it’s impossible to have a terrorist attack…

Stone: No, I’m not saying that. The danger is if you ran a plane into the spent fuel pool. You could have a problem with that. Why do we have spent fuel pools? One of the reasons we have spent fuel pools around the country is we have not come up with a solution to deal with the waste. And why is that? But that is a problem; I absolutely agree that is a problem.

Audience: So what would be the impact?

Stone: What would be the impact? If a jet ran into Indian Point, you’d get a large release of radiation, which would probably have the same effect that maybe Fukushima had. I don’t know.

But let’s step back, because the question really is: what if we get rid of all the nuclear power around the world, and we never pursue it again? What are the consequences of that? Now, everybody here in New York City just experienced Hurricane Sandy. That cost 50 billion dollars. Suppose that just becomes an annual event, because we’re just spewing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere? CO2 emissions now are higher than they have ever been in all of human history. They are going up in an accelerating rate. We are burning coal in an accelerating rate. 2012 was the hottest year on record. Everything is trending in the wrong direction, and we need to do something very dramatic. So you need to measure that risk, which is quantifiable and scientifically provable, versus an abstract risk of something maybe happening, of which we know sort of what the damage would be.

There’s no perfect solution. There’s no perfect energy source that carries no risk. All of life is a risk. But we are facing an imminent – I believe, from talking to the climate scientists – we are facing an imminent catastrophe, within the lifetime of some of the people in this room. And what we do in the next few decades is going to determine the future of all humanity. It’s about reducing CO2 emissions. What do we have? Nuclear power has amazing potential. Nobody’s talking about building Indian Point again, or Vermont Yankee, or any of those kinds of things. These are totally new, different types of reactors that are fueled by nuclear waste, that are passively safe, that are economically viable – why would you be against that?

Audience: Would you recommend that they extend the licenses of Indian Point, which are now under review?

Stone: Well, depends what the option is. I would like to see an advanced nuclear reactor replace Indian Point. I don’t want to see a gas plant replace Indian Point. I live up in the Catskills; hydrofracking is not something I’m in favor of. I don’t want to see a coal plant. You’re not going to put up a few wind turbines or solar panels to replace, I think it’s like 1/3 of New York City’s electricity comes from Indian Point? That’s not going to happen. So what are your choices? That’s the thing. I think all the nuclear plants that we have online now should be responsibly, slowly phased out and replaced with advanced designs. That’s what I’d like to see.

Audience: Hi, I’m from Fusion Energy League, and my question relates to what that man asked…

Robert Stone: That’s Kevin Rafferty. He made The Atomic Cafe. He’s a great filmmaker.

Audience: …about the bad guys and, more to the point, conflict of interest. As a fusion promoter, we’re often talking down fission. Because our weakness is, of course, that we don’t work yet, and, of course, you guys do. But that’s just one conflict of interest. I imagine you get that everywhere. And that one line that you pointed out about how solar, not nuclear, was funded by oil, to me was where the real resistance is coming from.

Stone: I’m not sure I get…do you have a question?

Audience: Yes! The question is, where is the most resistance? Where would the power come to transform to nuclear? ‘Cause it seems like the “bad guys” of the film…

Stone: Oh, now I understand your question. The resistance is purely economics, at the moment. It’s not going to happen in the United States. We’re just burning gas and we’re going to burn gas for 30, 40 years. That’s what we’re doing. Gas is cheaper than air. We’re going to burn gas.

Everything that’s exciting in nuclear energy is all happening in China and India and elsewhere in Asia. The Chinese are going gangbusters on nuclear. They’ve got 27 plants that they’re building right now, and they’re experimenting with the very latest designs. In 30 years, we’re going run out of gas or realize that our CO2 emissions are the highest in the world, and we’re gonna be buying nuclear reactors from China. I’m afraid that’s probably where it’s going to go. But that is the resistance. You’ve got to make it economically viable. If it’s not economically viable, it’s not going to happen.

Audience: So the US can’t foresee that, “Oh, we’re gonna run out of this?” Or are they shifting their assets?

Stone: Well, that was the other really amazing discovery in making this film. I’d always heard about the nuclear industry. And there is no nuclear industry. It doesn’t exist. It’s surprising. They’re just big energy companies. They own nuclear reactors, they own coal plants, they own solar arrays, they own wind farms; they own all kinds of shit. And nuclear is just one of them, and they don’t want to promote their nuclear power, because the only reason to promote nuclear is to say, “This can solve climate change,” but then they’re dissing their coal plants, which are making a lot of money as well as their nuclear plants.

So, you know, there’s really nobody to say to support nuclear power. Except environmentalists, I think, who really ought to take a look at this as a viable solution. We’ve been trying wind and solar for 30 years. We’ve been trying international treaties for 30 years. At 350.org now, they want to just turn off the spigot, divest in the fossil fuel plants and turn off the Keystone XL, but I don’t see anyone turning in their iPhones or shutting off their computers or taking the stairways instead of the elevators. We’re all consuming a lot of energy. And that’s the problem. We’re going consume a lot more of it. Not just here, but mostly in the developing world. And do you want to tell people in the developing world that they shouldn’t have energy? There’s a lot of that going around, too.

Jennifer Clibbon covered the thread of Russian docs running through Hot Docs for the CBC blog The Buzz. Writing for the Documentary Channel blog, Christopher Campbell shared his festival experience. Peter Knegt of Indiewire teased out 10 highlights from John Sloss’s doc master class. And at Filmmaker Magazine, Allan Tong spoke to D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus about the 20th anniversary screening of their doc classic WAR ROOM at Hot Docs. This time writing for Film School Rejects, Christopher Campbell reviewed the film THE EXPEDITION TO THE END OF THE WORLD from Daniel Dencik. And back at the POV blog, Tom Roston put out another call for improved documentary criticism. Also, in The New York Times, Roston wrote about UNCLAIMED by director Michael Jorgenson, a film whose main subject’s claims are being refuted by the U.S. government.

There was other big doc news out of Canada this week, namely that the National Film Board of Canada planned to create an online subscription service for streaming docs, i.e. the Netflix of documentary. Kate Taylor of the Globe and Mail reported on the details, as did Kelly Anderson of Realscreen and Jennie Punter of Variety.

This week Stranger Than Fiction is hosting director Robert Stone’s film PANDORA’S PROMISE, about the embrace of nuclear power by some of its strongest former opponents. The film is screening on Tuesday, May 7 at 8pm at the IFC Center in Manhattan, and will be followed by a Q&A with Stone. For more information and to purchase tickets please go here.

HBO this week announced the details of its summer doc schedule, which includes PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER from Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin and Josh Fox’s GASLAND II, among other films. Kelly Anderson of Realscreen reported the news, as did Alison Willmore of Indiewire.

The Oscar-voting process for docs continues to keep evolving, with Nicole Sperling of the Los Angeles Times reporting that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced on Saturday that it was opening up voting on doc shorts to all of its members. The BBC also had coverage of the change.

Vadim Rizov played the contrarian this week, with a piece for Film.com that challenged the notion that we’re currently in the midst of a golden age of documentary filmmaking.

In distro news, Realscreen’s Adam Benzine reported that CNN Films had snagged U.S. television rights for PANDORA’S PROMISE with a premiere date set for November. Also, Anthony Kaufman shared his take on PANDORA’S PROMISE for a post at the Indiewire blog Reel Politik. And Peter Knegt of Indiewire had the news that Chiemi Karasawa’s film ELAINE STRITCH: SHOOT ME had gotten picked up by Sundance Selectors for North American distribution.

Basil Tsiokos had an overview of films screening at this year’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver, while Glen Schafer of The Province covered the festival’s May 3 opening. Tsiokos last week also previewed DocAviv: The Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival, which started May 2 and runs through May 11. Back at Realscreen, Kevin Ritchie highlighted some of the docs screening at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival.

The PBS show POV this week opened its call for entries; you can find details on their website here.

At the DocGeeks blog, Emma Norton took a look at the online distribution approach used by filmmakers Gemma Atkinson and Fred Grace for their short animated doc ACT OF TERROR.

Back at the Documentary Channel blog, Christopher Campbell noted that the film THE SOURCE FAMILY from directors Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille was bowing at theaters this week. Also getting a theatrical release this week is Nisha Pahuja’s THE WORLD BEFORE HER, which won the top doc prize at the Tribeca Film Festival last year.

Speaking of Tribeca, John Fink of The Film Stage reviewed Sean Dunne’s film OXYANA, which screened at the festival. At the Village Voice, Alan Scherstuhl took on Victor Kossakovsky’s !Vivan Las Antipodas!

For those in New York City, Adam Schartoff’s Filmwax series is hosting a screening of Vikram Gandhi’s film KUMARE at the Maysles Institute this week. Schartoff’s podcast Filmwax Radio also found a new home this week on The Rooftop Films website.

At the SundanceNOW blog, Anthony Kaufman noted the hypocrisies of the right as manifested through documentary, particularly the film HATING BREITBART.

Soon after Tribeca ended its run, Stewart Nusbaumer shared his recap of the festival for Filmmaker Magazine.

Over at the Independent Lens blog, Rebecca Huval interviewed filmmaker Debbie Lum about her latest work, SEEKING ASIAN FEMALE.

The International Documentary Association (IDA) website, Katherine Relth shared a recap of its recent Doc U event on Fair Use.

At Filmmaker Magazine, the MIT Open Documentary Lab continued its series of new digital storytelling interviews by chatting up Lance Weiler.

That does it for this week, but remember to send tips and recommendations for the Memo via e-mail here, or via Twitter to @GuerrillaFace. Have a great week everyone.

Filmmaker Doug Block, who consulted with Polley early in Stories We Tell‘s production process, was present for the post-screening Q&A. He spoke with STF’s Hugo Perez about Polley’s process, as well as his own process when making personal documentaries.

Stranger Than Fiction: Doug, can you tell us a little bit about how you got connected to this film?

Doug Block: Sure. In addition to making my own films, I produce films for other documentary filmmakers, and I do consulting. About four years ago, I got a call from somebody from the National Film Board of Canada, saying “Sarah Polley is a big fan of your film 51 Birch Street and would like you to come up to Canada and mentor her for a few days for this program we’re doing.” I said, “Okay. That sounds really good.” The National Film Board of Canada produced the film, and Sarah said the most amazing thing about it was that they kept encouraging her to be more experimental and more groundbreaking. The one imperative they gave her was to go as far outside the box of documentary as she could go. Anyways, I was a fan of hers from her fiction films and from her acting, so I embraced the opportunity.

I don’t want to pretend I had some big, undue influence over this film, but it was an interesting time, because she was still trying to figure out what the film would be. She told me the story – it took her almost a day to tell me this amazing story, and my jaw just kept going wider and wider. But she had all these really outside-the-box ideas that didn’t end up in the film. She was going to have herself, Harry, and her dad go up on stage and perform the story in front of a live audience, including the family members. So that was one thing. There was going to be a lot of animation in it, there was going to be all sorts of experimental stuff, and strangely enough, she really downplayed the reenactments. I saw this for the first time a few weeks ago, when it played at New Directors/New Films, and I’d totally forgotten about that, and it wasn’t until halfway through the movie that I went, “This can’t be. This can’t be home movie footage.” I’d be really curious to poll everybody about when you figured out that this was not home movie footage. For me, it was the memorial service, when you see Harry in the background. (laughter) And how it all had the same color temperature, no matter what situation it was in. (laughter) It all had the same kind of camera movements, it was all slightly out of focus, and the mother looks so different in different shots.

STF: The film and the storytelling is simple and direct yet profound at the same time. Can you talk a little about your own experiences? When you decide to tell your own story and share your story, what’s the mental process that happens?

Block: “Are you fucking nuts?” I think is the first thing I think. I mean, that was a question Sarah asked, because she was really wrestling with this idea. She was profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of putting her family out there so publicly. So she asked a lot of questions about what that felt like and why I made that film, 51 Birch Street, which was the first really personal film that I made about my family members. But I never intended to make that film, until I was actually making it.

I don’t want to presume that people have seen it, but 51 Birch Street was a film about all of these discoveries that I made after my mother died kind of suddenly and unexpectedly, about 12 years ago. After what we all thought was a very happy 54-year marriage, my father calls three months later from Florida to announce he’s moving in with his secretary from 40 years ago. They married and sold the family home in Long Island, and I went out there with my sisters a couple weeks before the movers came. Among other things, I discovered three large boxes of my mother’s diaries.

I never intended, even during that time, to make a film about this, except my father was the kind of guy who never talked about himself and his feelings, and I had taken my camera with me, thinking I was just going to get some  last shots of the house before it all went away. I threw a couple of questions at my father, and for the first time, he started opening up about my mother and about the marriage. I was fascinated, and I thought, “Oh, Dad wants to talk. Great.” I went back a couple days later, just to keep the conversation going, and at one point I asked him, “So do you miss Mom?” And he goes, “No.” I swear to God, in that moment, I went from not making a film to making a film. (laughter) I realized, like, “Oh my God, this is not just a story about our family. It’s a very universal story about whether we know our parents and, if we had the chance to get to know them, would we really want to know them?” (laughter) Do we really want to get underneath those family secrets that may come popping out if you open a thing like your mother’s diaries? And then do you share that with the world?

STF: I guess it depends at what point in your life you find out about the secrets.

Block: Yeah, I was old enough. I’d gone through some therapy, so… (laughter)

STF: So you were ready.

Block: I guess. You’re never quite ready for that. I mean, you know, I think what was really helpful for me was that I had made two films before that, and the film I’d made right before that had gone to Sundance. So when I thought to myself “I can’t believe I’m doing this to my mother; can Jews burn in Hell for doing this to their parents?” I kept reminding myself, “You’ve made films before. You fooled them last time – it got into Sundance – and you’ll fool them again. Just keep at it.” Personal films are so hard to do because you’re so close to them. To have that objectivity and distance to pull yourself back and see yourself as a character in a story, not as therapy but as entertainment for audiences, requires a certain amount of life experience and security. I’m just in awe of Sarah, who was half my age when she made this film and tried to wrestle with the same demons. She just blows me away.

STF: I suppose it’s all about finding your voice, or having a voice you feel confident in.

Block: And also having a really great editor helps. That’s the big thing for making these kinds of films. There are quite a few really great makers of personal documentaries who edit their own work: Ross McElwee, Alan Berliner, Nina Davenport. I don’t know how they do it. I honestly don’t. For me, it’s just really, really critical to have a collaborator like that who doesn’t know my family and who’s helping me to see it with some distance. This is the second time I’ve seen Stories We Tell, and it’s really well edited. I mean, it’s just so beautifully edited.

Audience: Do you journal? Or did Sarah journal? Is journaling part of the process of finding your voice in the story you’re trying to tell?

Block: I journaled way back. After finding my mother’s diaries, I stopped. (laughter) I burned all my diaries. (laughter) I do. I journal to the extent that I keep a notebook, and I’m always throwing my thoughts down there. I can’t speak for Sarah, although I do know that she journaled over a long period of time.

In my notes to myself, I’m constantly trying to figure out what my role is in the film and what’s the film really about. And, underneath that, what’s it really, really about? Because I think with personal documentaries, it’s really important to find a bigger theme that’s going on underneath than just your family story. Stories We Tell has many interesting themes: memory, truth…

STF: The nature of love and family.

Block: Yeah! And who owns the story, and if there’s such a thing as owning a story. I think that is very helpful to me, and it’s always helpful in the process of doing it. Particularly when you’re shooting, because I think it’s important in a personal documentary to understand your role in the film, even as you’re making it.

With 51 Birch Street, I knew I had two weeks to shoot the film from the moment I decided it was going to be a film. My father was going to move, and I knew the story would end then. And during that two-week period, I was furiously writing away every night, like, “What is this film about? Okay, I’m making this film. What’s it about? What’s my role?” I was close to my mother and not so close to my father, so I decided my role was to be the aggrieved son trying to get the goods on my father. So that when I interviewed him, I would know where I was coming from in the film. But other than that, you can’t figure your role out too deeply.

So much of this is created in the editing room, which is another reason to work with a really good editor. You’re literally writing the film. Maybe not narrating, but the editing is kind of the writing. And I know that was the part that drove Sarah the craziest, because she writes her own narrative films, and she loves writing but hates editing. Or it’s the most painful and difficult part of the process for her.

Audience: I wanted to ask a related question about figuring out your character or, in this case, her lack of one. I think that was an interesting choice, that Sarah’s the only really opaque person in the film. She keeps a real directorial distance. Compared to somebody like Ross McElwee, who’s very much looking at himself, she looks at everybody else. Can you speak to that decision and what that might mean?

Block: It was a choice she made to let the family tell the story. I only know that it was really, really difficult for her to give up control and put it in the hands of everybody else in the family, because she doesn’t buy into some of the other perspectives. She had to allow everyone to tell stuff that she thought wasn’t truthful, or wasn’t accurate, or she saw in a different way. I know that was really difficult. But I thought it was a really interesting decision.

In a sense, the film is her spin on the fact that she can’t get at the truth, because it’s only coming back at her in fragments of what everybody else says. And everybody has their own vested interest in their story. They want to make themselves look good sometimes, certainly in the case of Harry and her dad. When they started to take ownership of the story, they did it in large part to make themselves look good. Everybody has motives. I thought it was a really, really interesting choice for her to be the director. I thought it was really brave of her to not talk about her feelings, or to do it just sort of tangentially.

STF: The only other character who doesn’t really speak is Diane, the mother. Both Sarah and Diane, you feel them through what everybody else is saying and through Sarah’s directorial choices.

Audience: Do you think using the staged reenactments were a bit of a distraction at times? They lent themselves to the storytelling, but as I was watching it, I was dissecting it and trying to figure out if it was real or not, and that took away from the rest of the story. In retrospect, do you think it helped or detracted from the story?

Block: I’m curious: How many people felt distracted from the story by the reenactments? (Pause) I see one and a half hands. (laughter) I don’t know. I thought they were really effective, myself. Even after I knew they were reenactments, and, actually, almost more so after I knew they were reenactments. But that’s just me. I don’t know. I just thought it was really…to me, it was helpful to get into the story.

Audience: Right, but then you find out they’re not the actual people. So you may not care as much. Like, it’s just some actor, it’s not the mother, it’s not the father…

STF: It also brings into question the whole idea of memory, you know? Like, what we think of as our memories are just as deceitful in a way as staged reenactments on Super-8.

Block: One of the films that this film called up for me is actually my favorite fiction film of all time, Citizen Kane. I’d totally embarrass Sarah by saying that this is like the Citizen Kane of documentaries. (laughter) But I think there’s quite a few apt comparisons, such as the use of overlapping stories, showing that everyone’s seeing it from their perspective, the reenactments, the trying to get at who the main character is…

STF: The other film that it reminded me of was Guy Maddin’s documentary, My Winnipeg. Has anybody seen that film? In that film, he stages scenes from his childhood with actors, but he tells you that he’s hired actors to play his mother, and you see them setting up these scenes from his childhood. Have you seen that film?

Block: Yeah, I did. It’s another visually beautiful film.

Audience: You always give great advice to other filmmakers. Who do you go to for advice?

Block: That’s a really good question. You know, when I’m starting a film, I work with a great producing partner, Lori Cheatle. We’ll hash out ideas together. And when I’m working on the film, it’s the editor. It’s really close collaboration and my favorite part of the process.

It’s a kind of lonely endeavor, because, in a way, advice should be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes the opposite of good advice is true as well. Like, when you make a documentary, you should do your homework and find out how to prepare a budget and where to get the funding from and set up a website and a blog and get on Facebook and Twitter – you know, all these things that you should do. But on the other hand, sometimes you’ve just got to take that leap off without knowing what you’re getting into, because if you really do know what you’re getting into, you won’t do it. (laughter) So both are solid advice. Oftentimes, you just kind of go with your gut. One of the great things about documentary filmmaking is you can just start doing it. Once you get the impulse to make a film, you just start doing it. And then you get into heaps of trouble. (laughter)

Closer to STF’s home, the Tribeca Film Festival came to a close yesterday in New York City. THE KILL TEAM from director Dan Krauss took home the award for best doc feature, while COACH from director Bess Kargman won the best doc short award. There’s a full list of award winners at festival’s website, while Adam Benzine of Realscreen had additional reporting on the doc awards. Writing for NPR’s Monkey See blog, Joel Arnold shared a roundup of films he saw, while Anthony Kaufman’s weekly Docutopia post also centered on the festival. Kaufman also considered how race, class and warfare played out as film subjects in a separate post at Indiewire.

At the New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog, Mekado Murphy posted an interview with Whoopi Goldberg, director of the Tribeca-screened Moms Mabley doc I GOT SOMETHIN’ TO TELL YOU. John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter penned a review of the Bill Siegel doc THE TRIALS OF MUHAMMAD ALI, while Brandon Harris of Filmmaker Magazine named Jason Oder’s LET THE FIRE BURN the best film he had seen at Tribeca. Indiewire critic Eric Kohn made the case that Tribeca should have created a separate category for documentary profiles. And Kelly Anderson of Realscreen reported that work-in-progress (T)ERROR from filmmaker Lyric Cabral had nabbed the Tribeca All Access (TAA) Creative Promise documentary award.

The Tribeca Film Institute last week also hosted its second interactive day, with Liz Nord providing a recap for the POV blog, and Alex Campolo of the Harmony Institute doing the same. Patricia Aufderheide did the same for the blog at American University’s Center for Social Media.

This week Stranger Than Fiction plays host to Sarah Polley’s well-regarded film STORIES WE TELL on Tuesday, April 30 at 8pm at the IFC Center in Manhattan. Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo of the Toronto Film Festival described the film as “ a lively and richly textured documentary that seamlessly blends past and present, the real and the imagined.” Following the screening, filmmaker and D-Word founder Doug Block will be in attendance for a Q&A and discussion. For more information or to purchase tickets please click here.

Today marks the opening of the Montclair Film Festival continuing through May 5, led by the team behind STF. Thom Powers appeared on CBS New York to talk about the opening night film TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM that will feature an appearance by the film’s director Morgan Neville and singer Darlene Love. The festival will highlight Neville’s deep career in music docs with three of his previous films JOHNNY CASH’S AMERICA; RESPECT YOURSELF: THE STAX RECORDS STORY and TROUBADOURS, playing throughout the week. The festival’s extensive documentary lineup includes over 50 films and events including some this year’s most buzzed about titles THE ACT OF KILLING, AFTER TILLER, BLACKFISH, THE CRASH REEL and LOVE, MARILYN. On Friday, MFF teams with the Blackhouse Foundation and Shadow and Act for a House Party to celebrate black cinema. The range of MFF films by African-American directors includes FREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS, GIDEON’S ARMY, GOD LOVES UGANDA and VALENTINE ROAD.

The Catapult Film Fund awarded six grants to doc films this week, with Kristi Jacobson among those winning funds for her film OUT OF MIND, about the practices of isolation and segregation in U.S. prisons.

Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog picked up an AP report that Asif Kapadia would helm an Amy Winehouse doc for his next film. Adam Benzine had the news for Realscreen, while Nigel M. Smith reported it for Indiewire.

The Independent Lens blog interviewed director Marco Williams about his new film THE UNDOCUMENTED, about the pressures on those willing to risk their lives to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. And over at Filmmaker Magazine, Brandon Harris spoke to Terence Nance about his film AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY. And also for Filmmaker Magazine, the MIT Open Documentary Lab interviewed Vivek Bald about his transmedia and his ongoing documentary project BENGALI HARLEM. Emma Brown queried THE DIRECTOR director Christina Voros for Interview Magazine, while the folks at Indiewire spoke to Josh Fox about his GASLAND follow-up, GASLAND PART II.

In distro news, Kevin Ritchie of Realscreen reported that CNN Films and Cinedigm had acquired the U.S. television and theatrical rights, respectively, to the Penny Lane-directed film OUR NIXON. Deadline reported that Magnolia Pictures bought North American rights for Ryan White’s film GOOD OL’ FREDA.

Basil Tsiokos had a few festival overviews at his What (Not) to Doc blog: one for the Independent Film Festival Boston, and another for the San Francisco International Film Festival.

At the New York Times, Brooks Barnes wrote up the film SCATTER MY ASHES AT BERGDORF, wondering about the line between documentary and advertisement.

Emilia Diaz-Struck and Juan Forero of The Washington Post reported that U.S. doc filmmaker Timothy Tracy had been arrested in Venezuela and accused of being a secret agent intent on instigating internal conflict. Tracy had reportedly been filming conflicts between the government and students protesting the recent election of Nicolas Maduro to the presidency.

Documentary arts organization UnionDocs this week put out a call for applicants for its documentary collaborative studio, a 10-month program for exploring the approach to documentary work.

The International Documentary Association (IDA) this week announced that it had received a National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) grant of $30,000 to help it build out a website for its magazine, Documentary.

At the Huffington Post, Karin Badt recapped the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, which took place in Greece from March 15 to March 24.

Writing for the Documentary Channel blog, Christopher Campbell highlighted some of this week’s theatrical releases, which included Victor Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!

Tom Shone of British newspaper The Guardian wrote a piece observing that docs seem to serve as a counterpoint to CGI-dependent summer blockbuster films about superheroes.

That’s it for this week, please remember to send tips and recommendations via e-mail here, or by Twitter to @GuerrillaFace. Thanks, and have a great week everyone.

In the wake of this tragic loss, Junger directed Which Way is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington. The film contains interviews with Hetherington’s loved ones and colleagues, as well as videos and photos spanning his career. It is a tribute to Hetherington’s life and work, providing deep insight into his decisions to document war and its effects.

Which Way is the Front Line From Here? screened at STF on Tuesday. After the screening, James Brabazon, the film’s producer and a close friend of Hetherington’s, and Alan Huffman, author of Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer, joined STF’s Thom Powers for a conversation about Hetherington’s life and legacy.

Stranger Than Fiction: James, let me start with you. This film makes such rich use of footage of Tim’s life from over the years. Someone said to me, “It’s almost as if someone had been following Tim around, trying to make a film about him all these years.” Can you talk about the process when you and Sebastian embarked on this film, and what it was like gathering all this footage?

James Brabazon: Yeah. I mean, in a sense, we were extremely fortunate to have such a wealth of archival material of Tim. Actually, the process of collecting the archive and looking at what we would want to include in the film – how Tim would help us tell his story – was, as filmmakers, really vital and illuminating. But also, on a personal level, as really close friends of Tim’s, we began to realize the breadth and depth of his interactions in the world that were far beyond what we had initially imagined. One of the interesting things about making the film, about reaching out to people and receiving material from them, was that there were so many people who knew Tim. He had touched so many people, who were both enamored and inspired by him. So it was a very enlightening process, as his friend, as well as a vital process as a filmmaker.

STF: Alan, can you talk about how you knew Tim and what drew you into the project of writing a book about him?

Alan Huffman: Well, I met Tim through Sebastian, because I was working on a book in the early 2000s that took me to Liberia, so Tim and I had that in common, and every conversation that we had was basically about Liberia, because there weren’t a lot of people that had been there during that time period. And after Tim was killed in Misrata, Libya, it seemed to me that there was a story beyond just the tragedy of Tim’s death. Initially, it was all of the people who intersected in the hospital that day, and so I began to delve into that story, and the more we talked about it, it was obvious that the story was really about Tim. But not in the conventional sense of a biography, because I felt like Tim probably would not want that. You see in the film that Tim was focused, literally, on the subjects of his photography and their stories, and he never put himself out in front of the story. So the way I ended up approaching the book was to follow Tim through all of these war zones and to also document the lives of these people whose paths intersected with his. Not only in the hospital in Libya, but along the way throughout his career. And it just sort of dovetailed with the film in that sense. The difference between me and Sebastian and someone like James is that they were very, very close to Tim. Tim and I were friends, but I could still sort of see him as a character in a story, and I think that gives a little different cast to the book than to the film.

STF: James, when you set out to make this film, what was your goal, and through the process of it, did the project change in any way?

Brabazon: The film originated with Sebastian. At the time of Tim’s memorial service in New York, there were a lot of people coming to New York who had been affected by Tim’s death, some of whom were with Tim at the time, and I think it was the beginning of the process of Sebastian trying to understand what had happened. He conducted a series of very early interviews with those people to try to understand better both physically, actually what had happened on the day, and also the impulses that had driven Tim and the others into that situation. And that project widened into a film, which HBO very wonderfully came in on very quickly and supported us.

So in a sense, the film developed from a kind of personal desire to understand what had happened into a look at Tim’s trajectory in war. You know, when he first encountered war in Syria, he saw the affect of war on people and followed that through into looking at how young men at war see themselves and why. That trajectory is clear, but the work is unfinished. Tim was interested in showing the world to the world. I think that part of the purpose of making the film was to try to show the world how Tim was seeing and showing the world.

I think that the purpose of this film was never to be a final statement. It’s not a final reckoning or a definitive statement. If it achieves anything at all, it’s the beginning of a process. If the least that this film does is keep the way in which Tim saw the world alive, and then people are inspired by that; if it becomes in any way a call for action of some kind, rather than just retrospectively looking back at Tim’s work but looking forward to how that journey might be continued, then that would be a success.

Audience: I liked the perspective of the woman rebel soldier. Can you explain the back-story behind why she was chosen as a voice in the film?

Brabazon: Black Diamond is a very complicated figure, to say the very least. One of the reasons why she was chosen as a figure in the film is because we have a lot of material of her. She was an interesting example of someone that we encountered in Liberia, who we formed quite a close bond with in combat. Tim then maintained a relationship with her long after the fighting had finished. I saw her on a couple of trips back to Monrovia, and Tim spent quite a lot of time with her over the years and kind of followed her transition from a rebel commander through to a housewife in Monrovia. So I think that her thrust. We knew how significant Black Diamond was to Tim, and vice versa, so she seemed to be an appropriate voice. While we’d been in Liberia, she’d shown us a lot of kindness, which was obviously, as usual, deeply, morally complicated, because she was responsible for the deaths of a large number of people, and if she wasn’t personally involved, she certainly oversaw troops that carried out multiple executions.

Audience: Tim describes himself in the film as having a “destructive tendency.” Can you say what that was in reference to?

Huffman: I can’t speak directly to the treatment of that concept in the film, but it is something that came up many times as I was researching the book, and I think the best answer that I can come up with is this: a friend of Tim’s once told me that Tim had said that he felt as if he had essentially made a Faustian bargain. That he had made a deal with the Devil to try to understand the world. The way Sebastian described it was that Tim was a bright spirit drawn to dark places.

Tim realized that there was a darkness that he found attractive, because it was illuminating. I know that’s contradictory, but it’s true. You learn about what people are really about in very trying situations. What Tim carried with him that made him interested in that never really elucidated. All we know is that he had a fascination with it, and that going into these places and bringing back something positive from there was sort of a therapeutic process for him. That’s the best answer I can give. I don’t know if James would agree or not.

Brabazon: Yeah. I mean, look: Tim was interested in young men at war, and how young men at war see themselves. And Tim was also a young man at war, so he was interested in how he saw himself in conflict. Tim affected the world with his work, but he was affected by the world as well, and the way in which he was affected then caused him to affect the world differently in turn, in this sort of feedback loop. That interested him as well. If you work in conflict, if you work in war, it’s inherently destructive, but there are different ways in which being at war can be destructive. So the destructive, corrosive quality of working in war can have, perhaps, unforeseen consequences.

The opening scenes from the beginning of the film in Misrata really emphasized that the fighting that Tim was documenting in that house is not common. They’re extraordinary scenes, in which Tim had actually got himself in front of the rebels. So, that sort of magnetic force exerted by conflict is compelling but also destructive. And to have been in Misrata, the fulcrum of the war at that time, and then to get into that building, to be in front of the rebels during that fighting, you can’t get any closer to it than that, and it’s inherently destructive.

STF: James, you’re still very much in this line of work. You were in Syria not long ago, reporting on a show that’s going to be on Channel 4 in a week or so in the UK. I wonder how Tim and Chris’ deaths affected you and your approach to your work?

Brabazon: I normally pay someone to talk about this. (laughter)

STF: Well, this is a free one. (laughter)

Brabazon: Well, thank you. Do you mind if I lie down? (laughter) Sebastian and I arrived at somewhat diametrically opposed conclusions for the same reasons. Within an hour of Sebastian finding out about Tim’s death, he decided that was it. He no longer wanted to work in war. And I felt very strongly, very quickly, that I wanted to continue working in war. In fact, I decided that, whenever possible, if I had the choice, I would elect to do that. I volunteered to go to Syria. No one forces you to go; no one sends you. You are not a solider.

The reason why I want to remain working at war is complicated. On a personal, emotional level – which is really, totally irrelevant to this film – I just feel that it would almost, in some way, be a betrayal of my relationship with Tim to stop. We could spend hours unpacking that, but I just feel like this is what I do. I’m good at it, and it feels wrong somehow to stop now.

I think that when you work in conflict, there is this sort of bizarre moral compulsion to do it. There are people who live in areas that are affected by conflict, and their voices are just not heard loudly or clearly enough, and if you have the capacity to listen to that voice and broadcast it, and you can, and you’re good at it, and you enjoy it, then I think that you have an obligation to do it. The problem is understanding the nature of why you want to do it, and this is the thing that fascinated Tim as well. On the one hand, there is a sense that you are the conscience of the world, showing the world to the world; on the other hand, there is the inescapable conclusion that you are a vulture.

STF: It strikes me that Chris and Tim were of a generation that started out in the wars in Yugoslavia and came up through this series of conflicts, culminating in Iraq and Afghanistan. It felt to me, as I talked to people of that generation, that it was a defining moment, two years ago. And it’s also a time of transition in the media business in general. What is the lasting effect of their deaths?

Huffman: I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, because when you look at James’ film about Liberia, you see that there were moments there that were every bit as dangerous as what was happening in Libya, and Tim and James could have been killed in the firefights there. You’re just taking risks; you have no choice if you’re going to follow the fighting. So I don’t want to make too much of the fact that they put themselves in danger to an extraordinary extent by being in Libya in the first place. Although, as James pointed out, that morning there was a firefight in a furniture store on Tripoli Street, and in the interior of the building, people were using hot weapons, long-range weapons, grenades; things that are used for outdoor combat were being used from room to room. There were moments when the photographers were actually ahead of the rebels in that building, but that’s not when Tim was killed. It was later in the afternoon, when they were just sort of hanging out on Tripoli Street, and this random mortar came in when everyone was just hanging out.

So I can’t really say that his death was directly linked to having put himself in a situation that was fool-hearty or reckless anymore than any of the other places he had been while he was in Libya. However, there was at work, I think, a different sort of dynamic in that you had a group of photographers, and that immediately changes everyone’s judgment, because everyone is taking their cues from the people around them. I spoke with Guy Martin, who was one of the photographers who was there. He was severely injured in the mortar attack. I was looking at some of Tim’s footage from that firefight in the furniture store, and Guy is just beaming. It’s the most terrifying, horrific scene imaginable, and he’s beaming. So I asked him, “Why? Why do you look happy?” And he said, “I don’t know. When we went back to the safe house, I felt ashamed.” There was something he got caught up in that morning. It was partly the group dynamic of the photographers, it was partly the excitement that the rebels had for what was going on, but he realized that he had overstepped a boundary, and he was really reluctant to go back to Tripoli Street that afternoon. But he did, because he was taking his cues from Tim. He saw Tim as an experienced photographer, who had been in a lot of combat situations, and that if Tim was willing to go back, he was, too. I think that inevitably comes into play. When there are other people around, you don’t want to be afraid. You don’t want to miss out. I mean, they’re coming back with these incredible photographs and footage, and if you weren’t there, if you were just sitting back and eating a sandwich at the safe house, what are you gonna do?

I do think there are a lot of photographers out there, just because of the changing dynamics of the media, who don’t have a lot of experience. They show up in these places basically with just a plane ticket and an iPhone that they’re documenting everything with and uploading images, and they don’t have the level of experience that Tim had. So they’re taking their cues from people who may or may not be exercising good judgment. James can talk about this better than I, because I’m not a war journalist, but there are changes in the chemistry of your brain, in moments like that. And sometimes that may work to your advantage, and sometimes it may work to your detriment. So I think the danger is that now you have a lot more people out there who really don’t have any experience, and they don’t really know what they’re getting into.

STF: James, there are certain conflicts that, in the West, take on a certain kind of romanticism. The war in Bosnia would be an example, where it felt like there were good guys and bad guys; even if the reality was more complex, that was the perception. There was an element of that in the Arab Spring, too. People are drawn to those moments, because it feels like it’s going to be a lasting moment of history. And there are other conflicts that don’t have that same resonance here, and I would say Liberia is an example of a conflict that, if you asked the average person about it, it would be hard for them to tell you what was going on there. Libya is another one that I don’t think had the same kind of resonance here. I wonder if, as a practitioner who puts your life on the line in these places, you can put into perspective what draws you to a conflict that some people on the other side of the world could give a shit about? (laughter)

Brabazon: Well. Okay. Another one. (laughter) I’ll try to be coherent. I mean, look: war rapportage by numbers of viewers is never going to work. I mean, if I were interested in ratings, I’d be working in light entertainment. It’s about telling good stories and telling them well. The fact that a conflict is unknown or obscure is all the more reason to go there and report on it, in my opinion. If there is a very well known conflict, like the conflict in Afghanistan, then go and make a film like Restrepo, which, whatever you think about the war in Afghanistan, shows you a different side of that conflict, and it might make you feel differently about it, which I think is really valuable. So it’s not simply about reporting unknown conflicts, it’s also about the way in which you report conflict that may seem very familiar.

You don’t sit around thinking, “I’m not going to go to the Central African Republic because nobody’s going to watch it, and I’d actually rather get killed in Syria, because that’s quite sexy at the moment.” (laughter) It’s a product of expertise and experience and contact and context. The reason why I work in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East is because I’ve gone there for the last 20 years. It becomes self-perpetuating, in a way. You don’t ask your plumber to change your light bulb. There is a craft to this. It’s not about picking random hotspots because of the fighting.

The context in which they occur is also extremely important. The thing is, wherever there is conflict, wherever you scratch the surface of conflict, it turns out that it will not be difficult to uncover US tax dollars or British tax pounds. So, although a conflict may seem very remote, your connection to it is actually much closer than you may think. Now, whether we can get that message to people so that they will watch the material is another matter. But I’d urge people to remember that, as well as being a photographer and filmmaker, Tim also worked as an investigator for the United Nations. He worked for the UN Security Council panel in Liberia, helping to track down war criminals and local mercenaries in the West African region. So his pursuits were not merely about the beauty and voracity of image making. There was a very strong desire to hold people accountable, and I think that’s something that runs very strongly throughout his work.

STF: Part of the context of doing this work is having a place to get it out to an audience, and we’re at a time of transition where the older, bigger models of media are receding and yet there are new opportunities with other kinds of digital media. I’m curious, from both of your perspectives, is this a glass half-full or half-empty moment?

Brabazon: The industry is just unrecognizable in many key respects, and, very briefly, what I would say is that the revolution in the means of both collecting imagery and disseminating imagery in the last decade, and specifically in the last five years, has created not a difference of degree but a difference of kind. What that means is that, although we see this withering on the vine of the traditional print media, there is an exponential growth in other means of disseminating the maximum number of stories to the maximum number of people. If you’re a storyteller, then you’re interested in telling your stories to the widest number of people, and then, in some meaningful way, we are living in a golden age of journalism.

Now, the question is how you monetize that, how you then use that and develop it and make it sustainable, and do it in a way which is credible and authentic. One of the issues with the shrinking and demise of the mainstream media and the rise of disseminating material on the web is that those traditional filters, which have shaped and analyzed and editorialized content, are going, failing. A lot of those filters are in place to protect people, to protect subjects. One of Tim’s big things that he used to talk about a lot is the idea that it’s not enough just to be a witness. You have to understand what your responsibilities are as well.

Huffman: It’s sort of hard for me to get my arms around the idea of this being the golden age. We’re in a major transition, and good things are definitely going to come of that, and the whole idea of citizen journalists is fascinating. Tim was fascinated by that, in Libya, and he talked about wanting to do a project based on all of the cell phone photos and videos that were being taken by people on the streets. If you have your iPhone, you can document anything at any time.

So everything is accessible now, but I think the danger of the collapse of conventional media is that there were a lot of checks and balances in terms of making sure that what you see is real and true. And those things are evaporating. That’s the risk that we’re in right now. You see a photograph, and you have no way of knowing whether it’s staged, because there’s no framework or structural support that will tell you, “Yeah, I can rely on this.” It’s not that the New York Times or CNN are without fail, but a lot of things are just scrolling by on your timeline on social media, and it just gets forwarded, and because you forwarded it, you endorsed it as true, and someone else sees it as true because you endorsed it. I think that’s the scary part of where we are right now. It’s also exciting, because there are so many possibilities, but I think when you don’t have that framework there that you can trust, it both opens new opportunities and creates new risks.

The doc WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? THE LIFE AND TIME OF TIM HETHERINGTON got a fair bit of press over the last week, cadging no fewer than four interviews with director Sebastian Junger. R. Kurt Osenlund interviewed Junger for the pages of Filmmaker Magazine, while Adam Benzine spoke with him for Realscreen. Alison Willmore of Indiewire also chatted up Junger, as did Christopher Campbell at the Documentary Channel blog.

For those interested in checking out Junger’s film, Stranger Than Fiction is hosting a screening on Tuesday, April 23 at 8pm at the IFC Center in Manhattan. Following the screening, James Barbazon, a colleague of Hetherington’s, and Alan Huffman, the author of Hetherington’s biography, will be in attendance for a Q&A. You can find out more information and purchase tickets here.

As surprising as it might seem, Junger wasn’t the only director to be interviewed last week. Back at Filmmaker Magazine, Mary Anderson Casavant interviewed Rachel Boynton, director of BIG MEN, about the oil fields of Nigeria. At the Tribeca Film Institute Karen Kemmerle chatted with Stephen Silha and Eric Slade, directors of the film BIG JOY: THE ADVENTURES OF JAMES BROUGHTON.

The Independent Lens blog interviewed Jon Shenk, director of the film THE ISLAND PRESIDENT. Nick Dawson of Filmmaker Magazine posed five questions to OXYANA director Sean Dunne. Also at Filmmaker Magazine, the MIT Open Documentary lab interviewed Tribeca’s director of digital initiatives, Ingrid Kopp. Liz Nord posed five questions to Hugues Sweeney of the National Film Board of Canada for the POV blog.

Last week David Edelstein, Bilge Ebiri and Miranda Siegel of New York magazine’s Vulture blog published their list of the 20 most essential docs of the last century. At the POV blog, Heather McIntosh reacted by questioning the value of any “best of” list. Thom Powers noted the New York mag list contained only male directors. He responded on Twitter with a counter list of 20 essential docs by women directors that was reprinted by Women and Hollywood.

The New York Times reported that the 2nd annual Montclair Film Festival, has “more of everything,” nearly doubling in size since last year. Led by the STF team of PowersHausen, Montclair has a robust documentary lineup including the world premiere of SHORED UP, a conversation with Alex Gibney and David Carr, and a free panel on Docs-in-Progress with HBO’s Nancy Abraham. Writing in The Star-Ledger, film critic Stephen Whitty highlighted Montclair docs including BEST KEPT SECRET and ICEBERG SLIM: PORTRAIT OF A PIMP with producer Ice-T in person.

In distro news, Kevin Ritchie of Realscreen reported that HBO had acquired U.S. broadcast and home video rights for the Whoopi Goldberg-directed film MOMS MABLEY: I GOT SOMETHING TO TELL YOU, as did Jorge Rivas of Colorlines. Kevin Ritchie also had the news that First Hand Films had inked a number of deals, while colleague Adam Benzine reported that Film Buff snagged digital distro rights for RED OBSESSION from directors Warwick Ross and David Roach.

Writing for the What (Not) to Doc blog, Basil Tsiokos provided his regular slate of festival overviews. This week he took on Toronto’s Hot Docs, along with Visions du Reel.

Back at the POV blog, Heather McIntosh weighed in on the recent ruling from the Illinois state government to deny documentary production entity Kartemquin Films a sales tax exemption. The POV blog this week also republished a great breakdown of a standard three-camera interview setup from Tim McLaughlin of the MediaStorm blog.

At the True/False blog, Dan Steffen posted an interview with Angad Singh Bhalla, director of the film HERMAN’S HOUSE, which opened this past weekend at Cinema Village in New York City. Writing for Filmmaker Magazine, David Licata had five questions for Bhalla.

This week documentary producer Daniel Chalfen became the latest to weigh in on the “Fair Trade for Filmmakers” article penned by Sean Farnel back in early February.

Christopher Campbell included HERMAN’S HOUSE in his round-up of notable theatrical releases for the week at the Documentary Channel blog. Also, now writing for Film School Rejects, Campbell reviewed one of those releases, UNMADE IN CHINA.

The demo versions of the projects from the latest POV Hackathon are now online, and POV has put the call out for applications for the fourth Hackathon, set to take place in NYC July 27-28.

At the Center for Social Media’s blog, Patricia Aufderheide talked about how filmmakers who have bad, but rare, problems with copyright and fair use can scare others off of engaging in the practice, and then offered some best practices.

In his weekly Docutopia post, Anthony Kaufman considered the films AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY from director Terence Nance, and PORTRAIT OF JASON from Shirley Clarke.

Jeff Gomez shared with Indiewire his list of things that made for a good transmedia project.

Writing for the Independent Film Project’s site, Marc Schiller argued for the end to the phrase “self-distribution,” saying it had a negative connotation for films.

That’s it for this week. Please send tips and recommendations via e-mail here, or tweet them to @GuerrillaFace. Thanks, and have a great week everyone!

Bitter Seeds follows villagers in India who are encountering a significant crisis: farmers, who have seen their crops and finances destroyed by the integration of genetically modified seeds, are committing suicide in vast numbers. In an effort to uncover the reasons why the farmers are ending their lives and what can be done to stop it, a young aspiring journalist named Manjusha travels around her village, interviewing farmers and their families about their experiences. The film profiles Manjusha and her uncle, Ram Krishna, one of the farmers struggling with depression and financial issues. The personal stories of Manjusha and Ram Krishna are interspersed with interviews with Monsanto executives and environmentalists, offering a diverse array of perspectives on the controversy. At a time when stories about the actions and effects of Monsanto could not be more relevant, Bitter Seeds puts a human face on the situation.

After the screening, Peled spoke with STF’s Thom Powers about the filmmaking process and the adventures that have occurred during Bitter Seeds‘ international screening tour.

Stranger Than Fiction: Micha, can you share some of the experiences you’ve had showing this film in other parts of the world? I’m particularly interested if you’ve had the experience of showing it in India yet.

Micha Peled: Yeah, actually, this film has been on four continents. I’ve traveled with it from Brazil to South Africa, to Jerusalem, to Hanoi, and I found out that basically everywhere people have the same kinds of questions, the same kinds of reactions. People are concerned about our GMOs everywhere. There are stories of Monsanto from practically every country I’ve been to, with one variation or another.

But going to India, to the region where the film was made, was the most incredible film tour I’ve ever done. I was with two other people, local people who were hired for this task, and we traveled with a mobile movie projector, a big white sheet, and two wooden poles. Every afternoon, we’d arrive to another village and set up in front of the temple. There was a huge green tarp that people sat on. We had a truck with a loudspeaker that would travel through the village announcing that there would be a film screening right after dark. And, you know, it was amazing to consider that most of these people had never seen a film on a large screen in their lives. I don’t know where the nearest cinema is, but I’d guess it’s in Nagpur, which is three hours away by bus, and when they go to Nagpur, they go because they have some urgent business. They don’t go there to see a movie. They’ve seen films on television, but those are Bollywood films. I don’t think they’d ever seen a documentary. They’d certainly never seen a film about themselves. So it was incredible on many levels.

We also discovered that we were losing the women early in the evening. I started questioning that, because why wouldn’t the women stay? There are certainly a lot of female characters here. It turned out that the women were not comfortable sitting next to men after dark. They needed their own separate space. And the only way to solve that, under these conditions, was to put the screen in the middle of the square, and the women sat on the other side of the screen. They saw the film flipped. The only things that really impacted were the subtitles, but they weren’t reading those anyway, because obviously the film speaks their language. The parts that were in English, we had somebody speak into a microphone and translate it every night. I did it in collaboration with Kishor Tiwari, who is the farmer activist you see in the film, the one who organizes the rally towards the end.

But, you know, it was a huge success every night until the final night. The final night, we got to the village where the film is set, and I went to the family of Ram Krishna and Sunanda, and they were cordial as they were hosting me, but I could tell that they were tense. I told them that I had good news, which was that I was bringing them some money donated by viewers in America who wanted to help them, but still they remained tense. In the meantime, Manjusha and her mother came, and I set out to call for the old man who’s in the film who I liked so much, and all of these people seem happy to see me, but Ram Krishna and his wife are tense.

Why were they tense? “There’s a problem,” they say. What’s the problem? Well, you saw in the credits at the end that their daughter did get married. There’s something there that I didn’t reveal, because I didn’t think it was important to the film, which is that the family that she married into is actually the family that you see in the dowry negotiation scene. Later on, they worked out a more affordable arrangement, and I was able to help them, but that wasn’t what I wanted you to think about at the end of the film.

Well, you remember that there’s a scene when the mother is consoling the daughter when the arrangement initially fell through, and she says, “That boy looked like a monkey?” (laughter) This is a powerful family in the village. The father-in-law gets contracts from the government to do road construction, and he hires some of the neighbors every year. So I said, “You know what? I understand your position, and for the first time in my illustrious career, I will self-censor my own film. We will fast-forward through those two scenes, because I understand it’s embarrassing to you.”

So I thought we had resolved it. An hour later, as it was getting dark, a huge crowd had gathered, and the head of the village council comes and says, “The problem is not resolved. The son-in-law demands that there will not be a film showing, or he will send his wife and their baby back to her parents.” So I was incensed. What does she have to do with any of this? And you can just imagine how hard it was for Ram Krishna. They are still in debt from this wedding from two years ago. So you can imagine how hard it would be for them if their daughter were to be returned.

So, I demanded to see the daughter’s husband. I’d never met him. He always sends emissaries. I did see him at the wedding, but I’d never exchanged a word with him. So we finally go to see him, and he’s there among his cronies, and it’s getting dark. I say to him, “Look, your wife signed a release form to be in this film. Her parents signed a release form to be in this film.” And he says, “But I didn’t sign anything.” And I said, “That’s right. You are not in the film.” (laughter) I said, “If you interfere with this lawful screening of the film, I’m going to go to the nearby police station and report you.” Everyone there knows that the police will act for whomever pays the most, and nobody wants to go against the foreigner, of course.

Well, I didn’t have to wait for the translation of the word “police” – all mayhem broke loose. There were shouts and a declaration that “the girl will pay the consequences.” And so I said, “Look, we’ve all heard that you are threatening domestic violence, and if anything happens to her, we are all witnesses to that.”

I marched back to the square, and all of these people are there, and the head of the village council says, “Well, let’s do the ceremony and we’ll see.” They did an elaborate ceremony and gave me all these gifts and a poster that said, “Best Friend of Vidarbha 2012,” and I gave an emotional speech. Then Kishor yelled, “Who wants to see the movie?” And, of course, everybody there raises their hand, because this whole controversy only got them more curious, and we started the film.

Now, I have to tell you what happened. Two minutes into the film, we meet Manjusha. It’s the very beginning and she introduces herself and says, “Three farmers in my village killed themselves and I want to know why.” They fast-forwarded through it. I ran to the guy holding the remote and asked, “What the hell is going on?” He says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, mistake, mistake.” I should not have trusted him. I should have stayed there. But I didn’t. I let them start again. Two minutes later, Sunanda is introduced, and she talks about how she was married to her husband, Ram Krishna, and how upset she was when her first baby was a daughter, and so forth. They again fast-forward through it. I ran over again and grabbed the remote, and inadvertently, as I grabbed the remote, I pulled the cord of the projector, and the pin got stuck inside and broke, and there was no screening.

So I wish I had a better ending to the story, but that’s what happened. Kishor later explained to me that he had told the operator to fast-forward because, when Sunanda is talking about her marriage to Ram Krishna, she also blurts out a sentence that is not subtitled, where she says that Ram Krishna’s parents did not demand any dowry of her parents, because they were all so poor. Kishor believed that this would be embarrassing to the daughter’s husband’s family, because they demanded such a big dowry from Ram Krishna. So he thought, “Let’s make peace and run through it,” but he didn’t inform me so I was upset. So that was the end of that. But it was the most amazing film tour I could ever have expected to have.

Audience: How did you find Manjusha?

Peled: Well, in all of my films, it’s important for me to have central characters to carry the story. The specific topic is less important; issues are a dime a dozen. So I arrived in this area, and I’d never been in Vidarbha before in my life; I don’t speak a word of Marathi; there are 23,000 villages there, so I didn’t know where I was going to shoot the film. I started traveling and going to villages and introducing myself to the heads of the village councils. I asked them to gather farmers to tell me their stories, and I would sit and hear the tales of woe of the farmers. And I quickly realized that most of them were like Ram Krishna – they were taciturn, depressed, you know, not the kind of people you’d hang a whole film around. You guys wouldn’t want to sit here for an hour and a half and just watch someone like that. But many of them also commented on the fact that their neighbors who had committed suicide also had daughters of marrying age that they could not afford to marry. And that social shame of a man not fulfilling his duty to his daughter is what tipped them over the edge.

So I started traveling to the high schools and introducing myself to the principals – you always have to go through the hierarchy, it’s very important there. And within a half an hour, I would be speaking with a group of senior class girls. They were two or three months from being eligible to get married, and one of my questions was always, “What are your dreams for your future?” And many of them would say, “I would like to continue my studies, but of course it’s up to my parents.” What they would mean was that they wanted to become a nurse or a teacher. But one day, one girl says, “I want to become a journalist.” Of course, my ears perked up, and I asked her why. And she said, “I want to tell the world about the crisis of the farmers.” So that’s how I met Manjusha.

Audience: Was your cinematographer female or male?

Peled: Do you want to guess before I tell you?

Audience: I don’t know. Male?

Peled: I went through a few cinematographers. The first one was highly recommended to me by Western filmmakers. He’d won awards and was a very nice guy, but what he knew was wildlife. So the first day of shooting, we were going to film Ram Krishna and Sunanda having a conversation. I said to the cinematographer, “Why don’t you set it up?” The way he set it up was he had them both sit on the couch, he put the camera on the tripod right in front of them, dead center, made sure that everything was in focus and the exposure was right, everything was good. And then he said, “Speak!” And they were supposed to have their natural conversation. So he was a nice guy, but I didn’t bring him back.

Then I thought, “Maybe a female cinematographer would do better connecting with the female characters in the film.” So I brought somebody from Calcutta. Again, highly recommended, but she didn’t speak the local language and had some other difficulties, and she wasn’t the right choice either.

The guy who got the credit as the main cinematographer was a young guy, only three or four years out of film school – Devendra Golatkar. He’s Marathi, he speaks the language, and he has a very wonderful eye for composition. He, like practically every Indian cinematographer that I encountered, doesn’t listen. He thinks that’s the job of the sound operator. So he really had to be trained to pay attention to the conversation to know when to film the listener or the speaker and so on, but I really loved the images he created.

Audience: Have you worked with any organizations to get this film in front of Congress?

Peled: Yeah. Last year, we did an outreach campaign, and there were 175 public screenings of this film, free screenings by community groups. Some of them had very much a legislative edge to them. In California, we had Proposition 37 to label GMOs, so screenings were organized in connection to that. All over the country, local activists organized screenings. In fact, this weekend, there’s going to be Earth Day on Saturday, and there’s a big public celebration at a park in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the film will show there as part of the Minnesota Right to Know Campaign. So we’ve done quite a lot of that. We’re also doing educational outreach. The film is shown in a lot of schools. I’ve been touring universities with it, and so forth.

The Silverdocs Documentary Festival is also no more, having been rechristened the AFI Docs Film Festival, and will expand its screening locations from Silver Spring, Maryland, to Washington, D.C. Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post had the details.

Mike Thomas of the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the Illinois Department of Revenue had denied storied doc film production organization Kartemquin Films exemption from sales tax, based on the rationale that the organization was guilty of “making and selling propaganda DVDs.” The ruling led to some understandable head scratching by Dana Harris of Indiewire, as well as a writer at The Documentary Site.

This week Stranger Than Fiction is hosting a screening of BITTER SEEDS, a film by Micha Peled that looks at the ramifications of the corporatization of farming practices all over the globe. The film is screening on Tuesday April 16 at 8pm at the IFC Center in Manhattan, and Peled will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening. For more information or to purchase tickets please go here.

Writing for the New York Times, Michael Kamber penned a great piece on late photojournalist Tim Hetherington and the new Sebastian Junger Film that memorializes him, WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? THE LIFE AND TIME OF TIM HETHERINGTON. At the Los Angeles Times, Robert Abele also wrote a capsule review for the film.

Over at Forbes Magazine, filmmaker Julia Bacha shared her thoughts on the potential impact of documentary films, using her own work BUDRUS as a case study. On a related note, a coalition of groups an organizations, among them the Bay Area Video Coalition, released a free Impact Playbook intended to help filmmakers and other media creators understand the potential impact of their work. Abigail Maravalli at American University’s Center for Social Media reported on its release.

Reflections on the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival continued to hit the web this week. At Indiewire, Sean Farnel issued his latest missive regarding fair trade for filmmakers at festivals, recapping a panel discussion on the issue held at Full Frame. Robert Silva interviewed Farnel in order to understand the impetus for his new campaign. Also at Indiewire Silva wrote up a list of five things he learned in Durham, North Carolina. Chuck Tryon had a series of three dispatches on the festival for Filmmaker Magazine, which you can find here. And Marianna Torgovnick of the TED talks blog listed nine films from the festival that she thought were must-sees.

Basil Tsiokos kept himself busy at his What (Not) to Doc blog this week, turning out documentary overviews for the Tribeca Film Festival, New Zealand’s Documentary Edge Festival and the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema.

A nice selection of filmmaker interviews were published this week. At the Neon Tommy website, filmmaker Debbie Lum was interviewed by Shakio Liu about her new film SEEKING ASIAN FEMALE and the fetishization of Asian women. The Independent Lens blog spoke with WONDER WOMEN! THE UNTOLD STORY AMERICAN SUPERHEROINES director Kristy Guevara Flanagan.

Rachel Aloy of the Independent Lens blog interviewed Alan Spearman about his beautiful short AS I AM. At Filmmaker Magazine, Lauren Wissot interviewed THIS AIN’T CALIFORNIA director Marten Persiel. And this time writing for Global Comment, Wissot also chatted with HERMAN’S HOUSE director Angad Singh Bhalla.

Back at Filmmaker Magazine, Scott Macaulay talked with musician Kathleen Hanna, director Sini Anderson and producer Tamra Davis about the THE PUNK SINGER, which follows Hanna’s life. If that’s not enough for you, Indiewire has a whole host of short interviews with directors screening work at the Tribeca Film Festival this year.

Writing for Film School Rejects, Christopher Campbell reviewed THIS AIN’T CALIFORNIA, which may or may not be a documentary. And at the Documentary Channel blog, Campbell had a round-up of the week’s documentary news. Campbell also wrote about this week’s theatrical releases for the Doc Channel website, which included THIS AIN’T CALIFORNIA and AMERICAN MEAT. Campbell and David Walber also issued the second The Realness podcast, which addresses the film FREE ANGELA & ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS as well as the practice of narrative remakes of documentary films.

For those curious about the latter film, Nicolas Rapold wrote a review for the New York Times, calling AMERICAN MEAT “inelegantly titled,” but “plainly and persistently presented.”

David Edelstein yesterday wrote a piece about how documentary seems to dominate the current cinematic zeitgeist, breaking the genre down into 17 sub-categories.

At Indiewire, director-cum-critic Robert Greene wrote a great piece about the issues related to film criticism raised by the Rodney Ascher film ROOM 237. And writing for Indiewire’s Press Play blog, Kevin B. Lee wrote about the continued conversation surrounding the film, focusing on its use of footage from THE SHINING.

In this week’s Docutopia post, Anthony Kaufman remembered the lasting effect that the late film critic Roger Ebert had on documentary films.

Joe Leydon unearthed a 1982 interview he had conducted with the late filmmaker Les Blank and published it on his Moving Picture Blog this week.

The Film Stage’s Danny King wrote a review of Sarah Polley’s film STORIES WE TELL, finding it “an exquisite, elegant rebuke to the standards that define so many of our most popular filmic narratives.” And at Artfuse, Gerald Peary reviewed RICKY ON LEACOCK, Jane Weiner’s film on direct cinema pioneer Richard Leacock.

Bryce J. Renninger of Indiewire profield the MIT Open Doc Lab, examining the research surrounding storytelling conducted by its staff members. And the MIT Doc Lab itself interviewed Brett Gaylor of Mozilla in the latest installment of its digital storytelling series for Filmmaker Magazine.

For those interested in the POV Hackathon, I interviewed Director of Digital Adnaan Wasey back in August 2012 following the first hackathon for the POV blog.

In a piece for the Independent Film Project site, Marc Schiller made the case for why filmmakers need to start acting like rock stars if they’re interested in getting paid.

i-Docs noted that the latest issue of the Australia-based Journal of Studies in Documentary Film focused on, uh, i-Docs.

At the Sundance’s Artists Services site, Orly Ravid shared some helpful tips on how to navigate digital distribution.

And for the web-inclined, the POV blog published this helpful guide to compressing video for use with HTML 5.

That’s it for this week. Remember to e-mail tips and recommendations for the Memo here, or tweet them to @GuerrillaFace. Thanks, and have a great week everyone.