It may all contain grains of truth, but my goodness there is a lot of codswallop being written and said about the power of digital storytelling to connect people/save the rhinoceros/bring you tea in bed, etc., etc. I suppose it’s a fine line between encouraging the development of groundbreaking work and peddling in hyperbole (and I may have ended up on the wrong side of the line now and then), but perhaps occasionally it’s useful to all just take a deep breath and rein it in a bit.

One of the grand dames of documentary filmmaking has some insights to share from her years telling stories about women, human rights, and Latin America. Lourdes Portillo is a filmmaker whose work crosses fiction and non-fiction, and POV has posted a video interview with her.

Portillo talks about her desire to see documentaries that incorporate more comedy, playfulness and art – “There’s a seriousness that is just overwhelming, like a dark cloud over our heads,” she says. She’s hopeful that increasing cross-genre work will help address this. “That is the great thing about documentary, that we’re adhering to truth as we see it,” she says. “But at the same time, there’s a lot of possibilities, of art, imagination, poetry, metaphor, allegory, all of that.” Watch the interview to see more soundbites and some snippets of her films as well.

One Plastic Beach is a short online video that follows artists Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang as they collect plastic that has washed up on a one-kilometre stretch of beach in northern California. In two hours of fossicking they can collect 75 pounds of plastic, more than they can carry back home.

I'm not sure which idea came first, but it seems there are two competing projects to capture life as it's lived by millions around the globe over the space of 24 hours.

After repeating in a recent post Ira Glass’s exhortation to use your natural voice in narration, I now come across a blog by Basil Tsiokos of Sundance Film Festival coming at the same issue from a different angle.

Christopher Campbell, who writes a biweekly DocTalk column for Cinematical, has written a post on the educational value (or otherwise) of documentaries. He sounds fairly jaded about the whole question, but does generally (if reluctantly) grant that docos can have educational value. I like to be a tad more optimistic, but he does make some incisive points about a lot of the films made in the last year.

I just stumbled across Soul Patron, a beautiful interactive webdocumentary about Japan.  The viewer joins Tokotoko, a small soft toy who is journeying across Japan to reach a shrine.  In each stop on the journey a home screen provides links to various points of interest at the location where you can take a closer look. This might be more information about how to cleanse yourself at the entrance to a shrine, or a close-up shot of water trickling over a ledge.  The video footage is stunning, although to begin with there’s not a lot of it.  In a way it feels almost too interactive - almost nothing happens without clicking somewhere, and at risk of sounding lazy, sometimes as a viewer I just want to be led. 

Killian Fox has written in the Observer a great analysis of short films on the web.