BRITDOC 08: 23rd-25th July, Keble College, Oxford. BRITDOC is the bespoke documentary film festival connecting international funders, distributors and filmmakers, from the Foundation behind such films such as We Are Together and Black Gold.  The festival this year boasts a double theme: Comedy and Music. Director Larry Charles (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Borat) will be attending for a…

Leeds-based filmmaker Mohamed Al Daradji has returned to Baghdad, where he shot his Oscar-shortlisted debut feature Ahlaam, screening it to over a 1000 locals and politicans at the national cinema. The journey has been documented by the filmmaker and is currently showing on Al Jazeera UK on Sky (details below). "It's about human stories... The Iraqi people change from being just a…

Variety (which is now free!) reports: Inspired partly by "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," a veteran showbiz insurer has started offering coverage for documakers, aimed at allowing free use of film clips. Initiative by Media/Professional Insurance is designed to explicitly allow documentarians to retain coverage if they rely on the "fair use" doctrine, which holds tha…

  A film director's first ever documentary film has scooped a prestigious Grierson Award, recognised as a top UK documentary film honour. The award was presented by the Grierson Trust at the Royal Geographic Society in London on Friday night, 17th November. The ceremony was to be televised on BBC 4.

Legendary Oscar winning docs director Errol Morris, director of The Fog of War, is to document the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, it was announced at the AFM over the weekend. The film is to be produced by Particpant Productions, run by former eBay CEO Eric Skoll, behind such films as An Inconveninet Truth, Syriana and Fast Food Nation.  

The sixth East European Forum begins Wenesday October 25 and for the first time includes a meeting of East European documakers, comissioning editors, and other doc professionals. Running until October 29 in Jihlava, Czech Republic, the event mixes panels, pitching fora, networking and a market.

Back on March 27th 1994, when Schindlers List won seven Academy Awards, it seemed that the film - giving an entire generation a glimpse of the full scale and horror of the holocaust - would help ensure such genocide would never happen again. Yet over the next three months, while the world and news media largely turned the other way, over 800,000 civilians were killed in Rwanda. A deca…

22-year-old Dylan Avery’s wish to delve into the reasons behind the 9/11 attacks led to him making Loose Change, a documentary that involves some very compelling conspiracy-theorising. It is also bolstered by some impressively persuasive evidence. Since the first edition appeared on the internet in April 2005, it has maintained its position as one of Google Video's top 100…

The Yes Men, a group of legendary corporate spoof artists who were the centre of 2005's feature documentary The Yes Men have struck again. On Monday Andy Bichlbaum, a 42-year-old former college teacher of video and media arts who lives in New York and Paris appeared at a conference in New Orleans before Louisiana officials and 1,000 contractors by presenting himself as a federal housing off…

  McLibel filmmaker Franny Armstrong has just helped over forty Iraqi refugee children to get back to school for the first time in three years,  by publishing details of their plight in a regular newsletter from her production company Spanner Films.   Armstrong is currently in Amman, Jordan, where she is filming the plight of some of the one million Iraqi refugees, w…

  Saudi Prince Allows Fly-on-the-Wall Filming   The BBC has been given unprecedented access to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Saudi royal family. The documentary will follow the daily life of a senior Saudi royal, Prince Abdul bin Moshin al Saud, a grandson of  King Abdul Aziz , founder of the kingdom. Some of the world's largest oil reserves ha…