The ITVS Indie Roundup

A curated list of indie news and recommendations from ITVS’s Rebecca Huval.

Celebrity documentaries don’t have to be brainless. Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service compiled a list of the top ten performer documentaries, including such classics as the Bob Dylan film Don’t Look Back and Madonna: Truth or Dare. (via POV) If you’re wondering where the inventive imagery of Beasts of the Southern Wild came from, check out the director Behn Zeitlin’s first animated short, the bizarre and fascinating Egg, based on Moby-Dick. Finally, a level-headed examination of what it takes for a professional film to succeed on the web from Short of the Week: “Cat videos and bad web series are not your competition. Your real competition is the 5,000 other dramas shot with shallow depth-of-field and digital effects that go up every week.”

What do classrooms look like in Lagos, Nigeria; St. Petersburg, Russia; and Jessore, Bangladesh? This fascinating documentary photo series answers each of those questions with a single snapshot. Advice for the creative life written by French-Cuban author Anaïs Nin, stylized into a work of art by Lisa Congdon: “You live out the confusions until they become clear.” Become an interactive documentary wizard even if you don’t know how to code: Zeega, funded by the Knight News Challenge in 2011 and soon to be released in beta, allows you to drag-and-drop media from YouTube, Flickr, Dropbox, Tumblr, SoundCloud, and other platforms. The Olympics are over, but our fascination never has to end. Here’s a slideshow of Wired photographers’ favorite stills from this summer’s games.