Documentaries – the debate

As an enthusiastic reader and commenter of the Guardian and its Comment is Free, I am delighted to link to this debate about the state of documentary films and also to this rather amusingly enlightening blog of a TV commissioner.

The Edinburgh International Film Festival people have confirmed my press accreditation for this year’s event, which is really nice of them, because I chanced it a bit as a freelancer without any commission and only poor old Indymedia as the main publication. Ooops. Didn’t have time yet to look for another outlet. The programme looks interesting, though in the documentary area, there seem to be fewer social-political documentaries with less interesting content on than last year. A lot of Palestine – Israel conflict films, but none about Iraq it seems, and hardly any about Latin America, which is sad, because these are usually my favourites. I still regret not having been able to watch “The Refugee All Stars” last year and the documentary about some prostitutes collective at some railway path ( could have been titled “The Railroad All-Stars” ?).
This year I am looking forward to Current TV’s and FourDocs open session on commissioning short docs because I am curious about their editorial policy. Of course, many favourite events coincide on Friday, 24th of August.

By the way, I will try to sort out all the broken links, additional funny characters and spelling mistakes on this blog later on today as they keep reappearing with upgrading the system. The old websites also dumps a lot of huge core files on the server which shut down my emails as well. No clue where they come from. But at least I have now been taught how to delete them.

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