Film and video produced with the participation of a community can be a difficult thing to watch for audiences used to slick productions. Viewers will forgive a great deal if a film generally conforms to conventions of scripting and acting styles, but the use of non-actors is still rare enough that we’re unused to forgiving the slight stiltedness that comes with the authenticity of using real community members. The pay-off can be more than worth it, though, if a viewer can look past the actors’ self-consciousness and odd staging and instead take hold of and follow the strands that lead to a sense of that community, in all its real, messy existence.

Finally I can stop enviously reading the reports of overseas documentary film festivals, as we’re now getting our own international festival and attracting the films here instead. Antenna International Documentary Festival will have its inaugural staging in Sydney in October, and they’ve just announced the major prizes. The SBS Award for best international documentary is $5,000 cash, and the best Australian documentary wins $2,500. There’s also an award for best student documentary, with a prize package worth $2,000.

Australian documentary gets a shot in the arm with the announcement of a new Walkley Award category for documentary. The Walkleys, Australia’s foremost journalism awards, have previously lumped documentary in with current affairs under the television journalism category. So while technically a doco could win, it’s a definite boon for the industry to have the genre recognised with its own award.

The Sydney Film Festival has picked a few controversial environmental films for this year. GreenUps, a group of Sydneysiders who get together once a month to discuss all things sustainability, will be looking at the green film selections at their next gathering on June 7. SFF will be there to talk about the films, and it will be interesting to see what a bunch of environmentally aware folk think about the inclusion, for instance, of Cool It, a film about divisive enviro-sceptic Bjorn Lomborg.

I wrote a while back about the documentary Food Inc., and how it inspired me to get up off the couch and rifle through my kitchen cupboards to examine the contents of the food I buy. The director, Robert Kenner, is now going for larger scale impact, and is launching an online social platform which he’s hoping will be like ‘the Facebook of food’. In an article on The Daily Meal (via @povdocs), Kenner says that while the documentary was aiming to inform people, he now wants them to take some action.

We should start seeing more indigenous stories on our screens following Screen Australia’s announcement of Call to Country, an initiative to uncover new Indigenous storytelling talent. Led by Beck Cole, director of Here I Am, five selected applicants will participate in a week-long workshop to develop and hone their skills. The -- and this is the cool part -- each participant will be sent to a surprise location where they will research and create a half-hour doco for the ABC. Applications close 24th June, and you don’t need experience to apply - more info here.

If there was a need of any more evidence that documentary has stopped just dipping its toes and has instead bellyflopped right into the mainstream, Oprah Winfrey’s Doc Club should more than suffice. Oprah announced in January at Sundance her plans to ‘do for documentaries what she did for books’, and the first Doc Club selection screened on Oprah’s network a few nights ago in the US (via IndieWIRE).

The Sydney Film Festival has launched its program, and I’m simultaneously excited and a bit exhausted already at the prospect of the massive documentary binge I’m going to go on next month. There are forty documentaries on offer, which works out at three and a third films for each day of the festival. I decided last year that three films in a day is my limit, having valiantly tried for four and been fairly incoherent/asleep as I dragged myself into the fourth. So clearly I’m going to have to make some decisions, especially if I actually want to fit in some fiction as well (and also have time to eat/shower/digest the films themselves etc.).