California

In 2007, filmmaker Joanna Rudnick learned that her application for funding from the Independent Television Service (ITVS) had been accepted. Rudnick, a first-time director, had applied for ITVS funding to finance the completion of her documentary In the Family, a look at women who are aware they carry a genetic predisposition to breast or ovarian cancer.

About this column: Many filmmakers ponder in anguish, How do other people—celebrated people—do it? Am I taking too long to make this documentary? Does everybody spend as much money as I am spending, or am I spending too little? And when filmmakers share their lessons learned in interviews in the glossy trade magazines, their tales seem to follow the arc of otherworldy heroes rather than real documentary makers, i.e. human beings like you and me. So each month, the Doc Doctor will go out into the world (this real world) of filmmakers who are successful and find out how they made it. The "Anatomy of a Film Column" is a chance to learn from filmmakers' hits and misses in real life examples. —Fernanda Rossi, story consultant a.k.a. the Documentary Doctor

I could just be romanticizing it now that I’ve moved, but in New York all the filmmakers I knew seemed to be creating by any means necessary—from Super-8 shorts to animation on their laptops while fundraising for a summer-shoot, to staging readings for a work-in-progress in between compiling documentary footage. When I moved to Los Angeles last year, I found myself at a Honda dealership working out the details of my lease agreement with Amir, a fifty-year old Iranian who preferred talking about his script for a $70 million movie to discussing the details of my Honda Civic.

What is the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund?
It’s a fund to support documentaries in the US and internationally that deal with contemporary human rights issues, social justice, civil liberties, and freedom of expression. It used to be the Soros Documentary Fund.

How long has the fund been with Sundance?
It’s been here for two years.

What is Latino Public Broadcasting?

In her review of Phil Kaufman’s 1978 remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, legendary film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “The story is set in San Francisco, which is the ideally right setting, because of the city’s traditional hospitality to artists and eccentrics.” This hospitality extends to movie venues. With its wealth of alternative screening spaces, San Francisco is one of the most welcoming cities in the country for non-Hollywood film.

Why was Newmarket Films created?

While the Lumiere brothers originally screened their films in a Paris café, the term microcinema was not coined until 1991 with the naming of Rebecca Barten and David Sherman’s Total Mobile Home Microcinema. Since then microcinema has come to define a broad range of small screening spaces specializing in moving image media that hovers out of range of national distributors, air conditioned art houses, and sleek museums. The hermit crabs of screening series, microcinemas claim abandoned spaces, creating surprising, inspiring, and unlikely homes for media.

What is PorchLight Entertainment?
PorchLight is an independent distributor of films and television. We focus solely on programs that promote positive values and/or are family-friendly.

PorchLight also produces and co-produces films and series, and currently produces two animated series that air on PBS: Jay Jay the Jetplane and Adventures From the Book of Virtues.

Attend the Los Angeles Film Festival and you never quite forget that you’re in, well, Los Angeles. The nine-day event, which this year took place during the last week of April, is held at the DGA offices on Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax, mere blocks from the Paramount and CBS studios.