The ITVS Indies Roundup

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

Get your creativity on! Longshot Radio and Radiolab talked about creativity, revision, and failure at the 99% Conference in New York City last week. For your listening pleasure, they compiled their editors’ picks of podcasts from the event. 

Behold the TV of the future: using an iPad as a remote, you can control the features that appear on your screen and the overall size, which can stretch the length of your living room wall. Wired claims this is just "what the TV industry needs to stay relevant." “I want a man like Putin, who doesn't drink. I want a man like Putin, who won't make me sad.” These are the actual lyrics to a Russian pop song. This gem is explained in the new PBS show SOUND TRACKS that will broadcast in Fall 2012. Until then, you can watch their series on the web to learn the political and cultural stories behind music around the world. 

Have a short film but don’t know where to submit it? Raindance compiled a list of the top 100 short film festivals worldwide. After Charlotte Cook stepped up as Director of Programming for the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, she was taken aback when a friend called it “niche cinema.” Cook describes her response and her experience programming Hot Docs in Indiewire: “I cannot comprehend the notion that documentary could ever be thought of as niche or a genre. Documentary is everything.” This should be interesting. The ironic international magazine Vice is pairing up with HBO to start its own news show. If nothing else, watch to find out if it’s possible to report from a war zone in skinny jeans. We all know David Lynch is the King of Strange. In 1995, he was also given a strange assignment: Lynch and 40 other filmmakers had the chance to use the first movie camera, the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe, with only a 52-second roll of film. See the results of Lynch’s project in Open Culture.