The Film Panel Notetaker

Hard to believe 2011 is almost over already. It’s been another great year of notes from film panels and filmmaker Q&As, but I have to give most of the credit to my contributing notetakers Erin Scherer, Liz Nord, Erin Essenmacher, and Rebecca Banach, all of whom have an incredible knack for transforming source discussion into compelling summations and analysis. We also had the great privilege to be chosen by The Christian Science Monitor as a blog partners in its Culture Cafe.

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Notes from The Master Class on Directing with Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing
AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs
Silver Spring, Maryland
June 25, 2011
Notes by Erin Essenmacher
*Read also on Christian Science Monitor’s Culture Cafe.
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are fierce. As Loki Films they have produced countless works for television and four feature length documentaries, with a fifth currently in production.  [...]

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Notes from A Crude Awakening Panel
AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs
Silver Spring, Maryland
June 21, 2011
Notes by Erin Essenmacher
Filmmaker Joe Berlinger spent three years travelling between the US and Ecuador following a lawsuit between Chevron and a group of 30,000 indigenous and colonial rainforest dwellers that claim the oil giant poisoned their land and ruined their way of life.  The [...]

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Notes from The Swell Season Q&A
AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs
Silver Spring, Marlyand
June 20, 2011
Notes by Erin Essenmacher
June 24 Update: Read this also on The Christian Science Monitor’s Culture Cafe.

I know it won’t exactly come as a newsflash, but love stories in the movies don’t always reflect the reality of love stories in real life. Real world [...]

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Q & A with Family Affair Director Chico Colvard
Silverdocs
June 24, 2010
By Erin Essenmacher
Family Affair starts with the memory of a shooting. Director Chico Colvard, who narrates the film, explains how in 1978, as a ten year-old boy emulating scenes from his favorite show the “The Rifleman,” he shot his sister with one of the many [...]

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Understand The Audience! Then Develop The Programs: An “Insider’s Guide” To How Factual Television Channels Develop And Commission Programs
Silverdocs
June 23 & 24, 2010
By Erin Essenmacher
The panel, featuring A & E’s Director of Development Stephen Harris and moderated by documentarytelevision.com founder and industry veteran Peter Hamilton, gave a behind-the-scenes peek into the development and commissioning process at a [...]

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Wo Ai Ni Mommy (I Love You, Mommy)
Q&A with Director, Stephanie Wang-Breal
Silverdocs
June 22, 2010
By Erin Essenmacher
Stephanie Wang-Breal’s Wo Ai Ni Mommy (I Love You, Mommy) provides incredible emotional access into the complex world of transracial, international adoption.   The film is equal parts heartwarming, laugh-out-loud funny, uncomfortable and at times, viscerally upsetting (the woman next to [...]

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Funding/Self-Distribution Case Study: The Way We Get By
Silverdocs
June 23, 2010
By Erin Essenmacher
I was totally mesmerized by Aron Gaudet’s and Gita Pullapilly’s The Way We Get By when I first saw the film at last year’s International Film Festival Boston.  I was intrigued (but not totally surprised) when I heard they had developed a DIY distribution [...]

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Freakonomics Q&A at Silverdocs
June 21, 2010
By Erin Essenmacher
The 8th annual AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Film Festival & Conference opened in Silver Spring, Maryland on Monday evening with a special screening of the film Freakonomics, based on Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s bestselling book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Exposes the Hidden Side of Everything. The film features [...]

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Doc Talk: Film CriticismSilverdocs 2009June 19, 2009

Photo by Brian Geldin
Silverdocs Director of Programming Sky Sitney introduced this esteemed panel of film critics from top media outlets as well as the man whose blog post inspired the idea for the panel, Thom Powers, Toronto Film Festival documentary programmer and creator of New York’s popular Stranger Than [...]

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