Documentary Film and New Technologies

Emerging digital technologies are opening powerful new ways to create and even to reconceptualize the documentary film. How will handheld video cameras and ubiquitous open-source computing change the nature of documentaries? What are the implications for makers and viewers of documentaries of today’s unprecedented access to online editing and distribution tools, to an ocean of data never before available to the general public? These and related questions will be central to our discussion. Panelists will include a scholar of digital culture, a director who has begun to exploit emerging technologies, and a representative of a newly-important specialty of the digital age – a curator of digital artifacts. Gerry Flahive is a producer for the National Film Board of Canada. He has produced more than 50 films and new media projects including Project Grizzly, Waterlife and Highrise. Shari Frilot is senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and curator of the New Frontier section of the event. Ingrid Kopp, Tribeca Film Institute Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She has curated the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar several times, including a retrospective on American documentary history and a documentary summit between Glasnost and American documentarians. Moderated by MIT Comparative Media Studies co-director William Uricchio.