Webisodes are something I haven't come across a great deal in my adventures in online documentary land. Anecdotally, it seems documentary filmmakers are more focused on creating one main event or site, and haven't given as much thought to the gradual addition of regular content to an online project - which seems odd given the mass of documentary television series.

The next OzDox event is coming up in Sydney on Tuesday 21st Feb, with a screening and filmmaker Q&A of Ser un Ser Humano/To Be a Human Being. It’s a series of six full length documentaries by Australian documentary filmmaker Russell Porter, which grew out of conversation Porter had with a Kenyan subsistence farmer. The series is based in eight communities globally and was a collaboration between students and filmmakers from seven film schools worldwide. More details here.

Bear 71 is the latest webdoc from the National Film Board of Canada. It’s a fascinating take on the impact of humans on the wild, told from the perspective of a bear. It’s also one of the best uses of the form I think I’ve seen, even for the NFB.

Continuing the Australian film industry’s navel-gazing tendencies, a documentary about the industry’s waning fortunes is being developed. Advance Australian Film by Courtney Dawson is hoping to get to the heart of why Australian films rarely draw big audiences to the cinema, and Dawson wants input from industry members and the general public.

This is a must-watch for anyone interested in interactive and collaborative documentary. Professor Jon Dovey, of the Digital Cultures Research Centre in the UK, gave a keynote speech to the Expanding Documentary conference I went to last December in Auckland, and it’s now available to view online. Dovey has a wealth of stories, thoughts and ideas to share around how online documentary can be a collaborative effort and also the technological innovations occurring that are relevant to this.

The Oscar-nominated documentary, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, will screen at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne in March, accompanied by the first two films in the trilogy. The films’ director, Joe Berlinger, will be in Melbourne for the Australian premiere of the third film, and will be holding a Q&A after its screening.

The upcoming Australian International Documentary Conference has released its program, and there is a host of fascinating sessions, screenings and panels to get your teeth into. For a start, the conference has seven keynote speakers including Nick Fraser of BBC’s Storyville, Al Jazeera’s Mostafa Nagy, and Chairman of the National Film Board of Canada, Tom Perimutter.