Woodstock is also great for the filmmaker experience as the town turns itself into a screening community for the 4 days it takes place – Oct 1-5. It is really good to see filmmakers relaxed and enjoying themselves. Through the years, Woodstock’s programmers have really proven to have an eye at screening the best of the years festival picks with a strong theme of American films, music and documentaries. Woodstock’s premieres included the opening night film Gavin O’Connor’s Pride and Glory and actor Giancarlo Esposito’s directorial debut Gospel Hill.

Doc premieres included previous Woodstock winners Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Johnny Cash’s America, Astra Taylor’s philosophical Examined Life and Adolfo Doring’s Blind Spot.

Of the many great films shown those to note include, New York filmmaker Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway (which won best feature narrative), documentary Bulletproof Salesman directed by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker and Marc Abraham’s drama Flash of Genius.

Audience awards went to narrative Let the Right One In and the documentary Playing for Change: Music for Peace. James Schamus, received this year’s Trailblazer Award and other honorary prizes went to cinematographer Haskell Wexler and director Kevin Smith.

Panels during this year’s fest featured the likes of Academy Award winning documentarian Barbara Kopple, sales guru John Sloss, producer Ted Hope, Josh Braun of Submarine Entertainment and filmmaker Morgan Spurlock.

One of my top-picks for the panel discussions was The Documentary Story Today: How is it Doing? Moderated by Heidi Ewing, co-director of The Boys of Baraka and Jesus Camp. Ewing started off the discussion by stating that she was tired of hearing that docs are dead and attributed the apparent demise due to the previous B.O. returns on a run of break-out documentaries like The Kid Stays in the Picture and Super Size Me. She compared those B.O. figures to mirages for current filmmakers, however added that there are still a lot of opportunities out there for non-fiction. She went on to say “Obviously there is a great crisis within the studio system – but that does not mean there is the same crisis within the independents.” Morgan Spurlock also added that he did not think that it was dead, “…but if you don’t perform in the first weekend, to the industry your film is dead. It’s not like it used to be where your film got to play out regionally and nationally.” Kief Davidson, award winning documentary director of Kassim the Dream and The Devil’s Miner joined in by saying, “I think all these distributors going under is good thing and necessary for us to be able to go forward.”

Brett Morgen, whose doc The Kid Stays in the Picture grossed 1.4M, follow-up film Chicago 10 barely grossed $200K commented that, “The mistake is that when you have a big break-out you assume people will follow-up to see what you are doing next. With The Kid Stays in the Picture, we really broke records for the B.O. opening countered by the disappointing B.O. returns of Chicago 10, which by the end of the week we were deemed a flop and which I have never seen a dime. With this current system it is physically impossible to recoup with the cost of marketing to open on just a couple of screens.

Ron Mann documentary filmmaker of Grass and Go Further also on the panel noted “I have a distribution company (Films We Like) I set up a couple of years ago when Weather Underground could not get a Canadian distributor, so I released it and it went on to get an Oscar nomination. We did it all with a grassroots campaign.” His advice to filmmakers is to, “Be proactive and creative in getting sponsors and distributors with similar films as well as touring the film with speakers that will help with Q&As etc is important.”

Award winning cinematographer, Ellen Kuras and co-director of The Betrayal – Nerakhoon concurred, “There was a time when you got money upfront and the distributor put money into P&A, but now they wait to see how you do on the opening weekend to see if they will put more money in the film. So we did it ourselves by going to the internet, by hiring interns to market to the film community and NGOs – to find an audience.” Documentarian, Michael Tucker and director of Gunner Palace and Bulletproof Salesman, continued, “I believe that the audience will find the film, may not be today but it will eventually find its way. Our first Iraq film has been seen by many high school kids in a large part of America.”

For more discussion notes from the panel at Woodstock Film Festival visit The Film Panel Notetaker’s blog. Also you can watch the highlights of the Woodstock Film Festival Award Ceremony including Kevin Smith’s hilarious acceptance speech on YouTube.