The ITVS Indies Roundup

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

Are you obsessed with GIFs yet? If you’re not, now’s the time to start. PBS Off Book produced an excellent primer into the art of the moving still image, known as the Graphic Interchange Format, from its uncool, corporate beginnings in the 1990s to its current heyday. Here’s a chuckle-worthy photo of Bill Murray looking twee against a wall of paparazzi at the Cannes Film Festival 2012. The festival featured the premiere of Wes Anderson’s latest whimsical confection, Moonrise Kingdom, in which Murray stars. Also at Cannes, Saudi Arabia experienced a lot of firsts. The country’s first female director, Haiffa al Mansour, brought Wadjda, the first film ever shot in Saudi Arabia, to the festival. The coming-of-age drama follows an 11-year-old girl in the outskirts of Riyadh.

If you’re looking for transmedia storytelling inspiration, check out the website yyyhhhqqq.com (for the URL name if nothing else). Courtesy of the POV blog, here are eight documentaries that tell stories unfolding over long periods, sometimes decades, and how they manage to transcend time. The eighth installment in the Up documentary series, 56 Up, broadcasts in the UK this month, almost 50 years after the first film premiered. 

Irreverent filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait, director of Sleeping Dogs Lie and Zed in Police Academy, tells Vice magazine why distancing himself from mainstream Hollywood was the best decision he made. Things got meta in the documentary world this week. Filmmakers Sarah Klein and Tom Mason made a five-minute short about documentary legend Ken Burns. The insightful video, Ken Burns: On Story, includes several game-changing tips on storytelling, such as 1 + 1 = 3. Burns explains: “The things that matter most to us, some people call it love, some people call it God, some people call it reason, is that other thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that’s the three.”