We hope you’re enjoying the last days of summer! The Center is gearing up for the fall semester. We’ve got an exciting line-up of events and activities, and we’re welcoming a new staff member. Learn all about it in the newsletter.

Hope to see you at some of the Center’s activities this fall!

The Center is excited to announce four prominent filmmakers are visiting AU this semester for screenings and discussions: Jos de Putter with his film about a Chechnyan children’s dance troupe, The Damned and the Sacred, Paco de Onís and Peter Kinoy, two of the filmmakers of State of Fear, about Fujimori's terror state in Peru, and Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán will screen two of his well known films Chile, Obstinate Memory, and The Pinochet Case. To learn more about the filmmakers and when to come to campus to see them, please visit our Visiting Filmmakers site.

The Center is pleased to announce the 6th Annual Human Rights Film Series. We will be screening 4 films over the course of a month including State of Fear, Videoletters, Sometimes in April, and Human Rights in Burma, a collection of shorts by WITNESS with a special video handbook launch. All screenings held on Wednesdays, at the Washington College of Law, and Thursdays, on main campus. Please visit our Human Rights Film Series page to learn more about the films!

Also, we will be having a panel discussion, “Copyright, the Constitution, and the Crisis in Historical Documentary Film,” on September 23 at the National Archives. Look out for us at the October Virginia Film Festival where the Center will have a screening and a panel discussion, “Fair Use and Free Speech.” On November 17 we are also preparing for the launch of Untold Stories Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. In December, we will have a World AIDS Day screening. Please visit our events page to learn more about these events, with complete descriptions and locations.

The Center’s project on filmmakers and fair use, Untold Stories , has found great reception. After panels at film festivals in New York and Toronto in the spring, Silverdocs, the Washington, D.C. documentary festival, featured a workshop on the subject, with co-principal investigators Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi leading it. Seventy-five people packed the small auditorium at the Discovery Channel to hear the speakers, and then brainstorm in small groups.

The researchers are also presenting their research at the University Film and Video Association conference on August 3 in Chicago and the Visible Evidence documentary conference on August 23 in Montreal. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop in!

On September 23, at the National Archives, 700 Constitution Ave, NW in the McGowan Theater, the Center is co-hosting a panel discussion with the Charles Guggenheim Center for the Documentary Film and the National Archives. The panel will be on the endangered right of "fair use" and its critical importance in preserving the constitutionality of copyright law. The discussion will focus on copyright clearance issues in the production of historical documentary films for the burgeoning multichannel TV market and in the distribution of older work such as Eyes on the Prize. Center director Pat Aufderheide moderates; speakers include Professor Peter Jaszi, filmmakers Grace Guggenheim, Rena Kosersky and John Sorensen; and Kathleen Franz, History Department, American University.

The Filmmakers’ Statement on Best Practices in Fair Use is in the final stages of creation. After meetings in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York, the last meeting with filmmakers to shape the document is being held in Chicago in August. Each of the meetings has been hosted by a filmmakers’ organization, including the Association for Independent Video and Filmmakers, the International Documentary Association, the Independent Feature Project, the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, and Women in Film and Video.

The Statement will be launched at an afternoon conference open to the public on November 17, at the Washington College of Law. More details soon!

And you might have read about Untold Stories in Kimberly Brown’s article in the May/June issue of RealScreen. If you missed it, you can connect at Realscreen Magazine.

Paco de Onís and Peter Kinoy, October 5-7
October 5 & 6: Filmmakers present at screenings of State of Fear
October 6 2pm, TV Studio, Broadcast Center.
Public presentation "Fear, Truth, and the Documentary"
October 7 2 pm, Wechsler Theater: Public presentation “Activist filmmaking”

Paco de Onís and Peter Kinoy, makers of State of Fear are exemplars of documentarians with a social conscience. Paco de Onís, producer of State of Fear, is the founder of Minds At Large LLC, a digital media studio based in New York. He has produced television documentaries for PBS (On Our Own Terms with Bill Moyers), National Geographic (Secrets from the Grave), New York Times Television (Police Force, Paramedics), NBC (TV Nation with Michael Moore), and MSNBC (Edgewise with John Hockenberry). TV Nation received an Emmy award in 1995 for Outstanding Informational Series.

Peter Kinoy, a veteran producer and editor, edited State of Fear. His earlier work includes Presumed Guilty, about the role of Public Defenders in the U.S. criminal justice system. His independent documentaries include When the Mountains Tremble, which won a Special Jury Prize at The Sundance Film Festival, and Teen Dreams (official Sundance selection 1995). With Pamela Yates, Kinoy co- produced and edited Takeover (broadcast on PBS 1991) and Poverty Outlaw (Official Sundance Selection 1997). He was an editor on Michael Moore's TV Nation, Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend, Trauma - Life in the ER, and the Showtime documentary Brotherhood of Hate.

Patricio Guzmán - November 17 & 18
November 17 5:30pm, Wechsler Theatre, Screening of The Pinochet Case with Q&A November 18 2pm, Wechsler Theatre, Screening of Chile Obstinate Memory 3 pm Public lecture: Making Art of Pain and Politics

Patricio Guzmán is a legendary name among documentary filmmakers. In 1973, the exiled Chilean artist took the footage his team had garnered and turned it into the epic The Battle of Chile, the story of the rise and fall of the Allende regime. In later years, he has been the filmic soul and conscience of the movement to restore a suppressed part of Chilean history. He will screen his Chile Obstinate Memory, the record of his journey back to Chile with the never-before-seen-there The Battle of Chile, and discuss his career. *Photo courtesy of First Run/Icarus Films

10/5-6 – 6pm State of Fear by Paco de Onís, Pam Yates and Peter Kinoy. Meet the Filmmakers at this local premiere!

10/6 - 2pm “Fear, Truth, and the Documentary,” a presentation by Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onís, visiting filmmakers in the TV Studio in the Broadcast Center

10/19-20 – 6pm Videoletters by Katarina Rejger and Eric van den Broek

10/26-27 – 6pm Sometimes in April, by Raoul Peck

11/2-3 - 6pm WITNESS’s Human Rights in Burma collection
November 3 - Attend the launch of WITNESS’s video handbook, and meet Sam Gregory from WITNESS!

The Center for Social Media is happy to announce the addition of Anders Lynch as the senior administrative assistant. Find out more about him on our staff page.

Fifth Annual Media That Matters Film Festival
Presented by Loreto Bay Company

Ready to be inspired? In MediaRights’ fifth annual Media That Matters Film Festival hip-hop activists, dancing peanuts and claymation teenagers tackle today's most pressing social issues. Media That Matters brings innovative shorts and take action tools to audiences around the country, all year long. The 16 jury-selected films by independent and youth producers stream online, tour the country through community screenings, are broadcast on TV and are distributed as a jam-packed DVD to teachers and activists.

For more information go to www.mediathatmattersfest.org or email wendy@mediarights.org.

DC Labor FilmFest 2005
September 15-18

The fifth annual DC Labor Film Fest will take place September 15-18, 2005 at the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Visit the festival’s website at www.djdinsti tute.org/film/

Or, for more information on DC Labor FilmFest 2005, please contact: Katherine Isaac at the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute or Chris Garlock at Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO