The ITVS Indies Roundup

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

Good news continues to pour in from the passage of the JOBS Act. For example, indie filmmakers could raise up to one million dollars. Cue the Dr. Evil face. Can the art-form of cinéma vérité and Werner Herzog benefit from the input of technologists? MIT Open Documentary Lab thinks so. “There’s this perception that documentary is this staid medium,” Sarah Wolozin, director of the new Open Documentary Lab, told Nieman Journalism Lab. “It’s not. It is this place of innovation. And I think a lot of documentary filmmakers have lost their connection to that history.”

If you’re an emerging filmmaker, score new cameras and lenses. Grantees will talk about Panavision’s New Filmmaker Program in New York this afternoon. Has TV surpassed film as the leading visual medium of our pop culture? The argument rages on at Indiewire. 

Alfred Hitchcock has been proposed for Britain’s national curriculum. Here are five lessons school children will learn from the suspenseful director, according to The Guardian. Vertigo, for example, “tells you all you need to know about romantic obsession.” 

Missing the San Francisco International Film Festival? Catch up on comments from Jonathan Lethem, who delivered the “State of the Cinema” address, and Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin, who directed the understated comedy The Band’s Visit and his latest, The Exchange. “Come to Kazakhstan, it’s nice!” That’s Borat’s movie tagline. Once banned in its setting of Kazakhstan, the film started a tourism boom in the beleaguered former Soviet republic. Since it premiered in 2006, tourist visas applications have increased tenfold, said Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov.