I finally made it to see the documentary film Senna on the weekend, my initial lack of enthusiasm for a film about Formula One racing having been outweighed by the overwhelmingly positive reviews. It’s a great character portrait of Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna and certainly worth the buzz, even if part of me did spend the film just waiting for the inevitable outcome.

This is an oldie but a goodie. It’s Like That was made in 2003 and I first saw it and was moved by it a few years ago at a film festival, but its subject matter is no less pertinent today. A short animation about children in detention, the video is now available to watch at Australian Screen - the online component of the National Film and Sound Archive. I don’t know if it’s only recently been added, but it’s a good time to view it given the current focus on an asylum seeker swap deal with Malaysia.

Mike Jones is a man after my own heart. Jones was speaking on a panel at the launch this week of the latest documentary-focused issue of Lumina, the Australian Journal of Screen and Business. Each panellist was asked to speak on the future of documentary, and Jones let rip about transmedia. Not the existence of transmedia itself, but the heralding of it as the revolution that will transform our stories into groundbreaking interactive masterpieces.

It’s National Science Week, so it’s time to get excited about science documentaries. Yes, really. Science on film is often done so woefully badly that it’s taken me half of Science Week to even bring myself to write this post, but it turns out that Scinema is making a pretty decent effort to address this. Scinema is a science film, video and multimedia festival that screens around Australia through the week and beyond, with submissions from across the globe.

Filmmaker Darius Devas’s father was on Facebook, with a friend total of two - one of whom was his son. While Devas was visiting his father in Byron Bay though, in the space of a month his friend count rose from two into the hundreds. It seemed that this pattern was occurring simultaneously around the world, as old friends from the Goa hippy trail were rediscovering each other online. A reunion was planned, and Devas knew he had his next film project.

Photographer and filmmaker Jeff Topham looks a little bewildered to find himself staying in the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney, but with the Possible Worlds Film Festival picking up the tab, including for the beer he’s just ordered, he’s not complaining. The shiny hotel foyer is certainly a far cry from Liberia, the location of Topham’s documentary film, Liberia ’77, which is screening at the festival on Saturday. Liberia ’77 is about Jeff and his brother Andrew returning to Liberia, where they spent part of their childhoods, and discovering a country slowly trying to heal itself after horrendous periods of civil war.

OzDox and AFTRS are hosting a panel discussion on the future of documentary to celebrate the launch of the latest documentary-focused issue of Lumina, the AFTRS-published journal of screen arts and business. The panel will be chaired by Ruth Cullen of AFTRS and speakers include Anna Broinowski, Rachel Landers and Mike Jones. The launch and discussion are next Wednesday 17th August at AFTRS in Sydney, starting at 6:30pm. Free entry but RSVP to rachel.fiddes@aftrs.edu.au.

The Possible Worlds Canadian Film Festival is well underway in Sydney, and I caught up with Canadian filmmaker Jay Cheel, whose film Beauty Day is screening on Friday (and which I reviewed recently).