Melbourne is clearly the place to be for aspiring doco-makers in August, as two of Australia’s best known filmmakers are giving masterclasses. Bob Connolly is presenting an all-day session on Saturday 6th, hosted by the Australian Director’s Guild, on long form documentary-making where he’ll be screening snippets of his and others’ work. Applicants can also submit an outline of their current project to be critiqued by Connolly. Applications are due this Saturday, more info here.

I’m still keeping an eye on the levels of high fructose corn syrup in my grocery shopping items, having been led by watching the documentary Food, Inc. to go rifling through my cupboards on the hunt for unsustainable and unhealthy products (more on this in a previous post). For anyone else interested in finding out exactly to what extent major food corporations have us all by the short and curlies, Food, Inc. is screening at a special event run by Social Innovation Sydney on 28th July. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion on the local food situation (as the film is US-focused). More details here.

I’m not really the target market for Jackass, and have never really been keen on watching a bunch of guys injure themselves in ever more creatively horrific ways. I do, however, find the whole concept interesting from a distance, which is why I enjoyed the doco Beauty Day, a film which is screening at the upcoming Possible Worlds Canadian Film Festival in Sydney.

The documentary renaissance continues, with several docos breaking out of the festival circuit and getting big screen releases in Australia this year. Senna, which got a huge response at the Sydney Film Festival, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams are both opening in August, and Project Nim starts screening in late September. In honour of this wave of public favour, Time Out London has recently cornered a few high-profile documentary-makers and asked them for their top doco picks. There’s a great mix of old and new - Wiseman’s Titicut Follies from 1967 is a favourite of Nick Broomfield (director of Biggie and Tupac), while Lucy Walker (director of Wasteland) picks 2011 Oscar nominee Restrepo, whose director, Tim Hetherington, was killed in Libya in April. And just to be different, Leonard Retel Helmrich, the director of one of my favourite films of the Sydney Film Fest, Position Among the Stars (also getting a release in Oz in November), picks a fiction film - Citizen Kane. See the rest here.

Some of the sessions I attended at the Australian International Documentary Conference this year are slowly making their way online, so those who weren’t in attendance can catch the documentary-making discussions. Collaborating with Community was one session that I found particularly interesting, featuring the crew from online collaborative piece Big Stories, Small Towns. Also posted online and in the same vein is the session on ABC Open, an initiative aiming to get regional Australians contributing digital content.

Some of the sessions I attended at the Australian International Documentary Conference this year are slowly making their way online, so those who weren’t in attendance can catch the documentary-making discussions. Collaborating with Community was one session that I found particularly interesting, featuring the crew from online collaborative piece Big Stories, Small Towns. Also posted online and in the same vein is the session on ABC Open, an initiative aiming to get regional Australians contributing digital content.

One could, if one was so inclined, spend all one’s days doing nothing other than creating entries for the surfeit of short film competitions and festivals that are continuously springing up in every corner and crevice. Indeed, I hadn’t ventured into my garage for a few days until yesterday and found that a short film festival had taken up residence in a dark corner. I rapidly shooed it out, and the accompanying hipsters with upturned milk crates under arm have now colonised the nature strip outside.

There’s something quite musical about Aboriginal languages, and it’s not often one gets to hear them spoken. The rhythmic sounds of any of the indigenous languages always get me thinking about what this country might have looked like before European settlement.