Wed 19 Jun 2013 | 
Julia Scott-Stevenson
Human rights: capture and witness
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Enlarge textMobile phones with video capability aren’t just for filming your friends injuring themselves while tarp surfing. Their small size (along with smaller and smaller dedicated video cameras) gives them a range of applications in the world of human rights awareness and activism.
topVote for your favourite documentary
Cinema Eye is an annual awards event solely for non-fiction filmmaking, with a pretty impressive pedigree of awardees, presenters and nominators even though it only began in 2007.
NSW Govt launches digital funding initiative
Got an online digital media project you want to get off the ground?
Nicholas Carr on interactive storytelling
While Salman Rushdie was excited about the possibilities of interactive documentary, Nicholas Carr is distinctly more downbeat (via @fromthehip).
I wrote previously about whether documentaries can have a real impact, and a couple of recent events are adding more weight to the affirmative.
The lists begin!
Bypassing best of the year and going straight to best of the decade, here is a list of top documentaries as selected by Hussain Currimbhoy, the film programmer at Sheffield DocFest (via @1Basil1).
How real is a documentary?
This hoary old question usually exhausts me, as I don’t think anyone really believes any more that the job of a documentary is to objectively present the unvarnished truth, or that this is even possible.
Tacos or tacos?
Food is inextricably tied up with culture, and also with place. Robert Lemon, a PhD student at the University of Texas in Austin, is studying how the growth of Mexican taco trucks in Austin is reshaping urban space and local community identity.
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About this Blog
Julia Scott-Stevenson Julia is a writer and researcher of all things documentary, and even dabbles in making them herself from time to time. She lived in the Pacific Islands of Fiji and Samoa for a few years, where she made a documentary about the inaugural Miss Tokelau beauty pageant and a short documentary about climate change in Samoa, which screened at the inaugural Pacific Climate Change Film Festival. While in the Pacific she was subjected to limited internet connectivity, and was staggered to discover the possibilities in online documentary on her return at the end of 2008. She has since been making up for lost time by undertaking a PhD researching cross-platform documentary, and also working on a database documentary about volunteers. Julia is also on the programming team for Antenna International Documentary Film Festival.
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