Lots of good stuff going on and a few important deadlines to alert you to:

- My friends over at the Center for Social Media have been biizzzyy – they have just a released a green code for filmmakers, Code of Best Practices in Sustainable Filmmaking, to assist you in greening your productions, and a white paper on public media, Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics. I need to sit down with the white paper myself, but I’m very curious to hear what kinds of thoughts they have brought together on the future of public media.

- The deadline to register for the International Documentary Challenge is approaching. The event takes place from March 5 – 9. I’ll be screening submissions again this year, so make me something awesome to watch!

- For those at Big Sky this week (I wish I were!), please let me know if you had a chance to see Dianna Dilworth’s Mellodrama. There is an interesting interview with the filmmaker over at Rhizome, an organization that I love! They are into some wonderfully cutting edge art and technology.

- A new Chris Eyre movie launches the next Native American Film and Video Festival, March 26-29. We Shall Remain: Trail of Tears, “explores the resolve and resilience of the Cherokee Nation, who resisted removal from their homelands in the Southeast in every way they knew.” Eyre has worked mostly in narrative (Smoke Signals, Skins, A Thousand Roads) but I have confidence that his documentary skills are sharp. If you are in NYC, the screening is free, just reserve your seat.

- For all of you folks who can’t wrap your brain around how documentaries make change, a story from the aftermath of Daniel Junge’s They Killed Sister Dorothy, the grand prize winner from last year’s SXSW. “Three people, including two gunmen, are in jail for her killing. But one of the ranchers suspected of ordering the murder had his conviction overturned last year and another, Regivaldo Pereira Galvao, was arrested only last month and now awaits trial. ‘The film has been very influential in the rearrest of Regivaldo,’ David Stang told Reuters at the World Social Forum.” Read the article>>

- March 13 is the deadline to apply for fellowships to attend the The Flaherty Seminar. If you haven’t been and you love docs, go!

Anthony Kaufman polled industry folks about Michael Moore’s announced Doc Night plan in his excellent indieWIRE article today. “Reactions to the plan are largely split between documentary filmmakers, who welcome any initiative that helps get their work out to the world, and industry insiders, who are skeptical about the plan’s feasibility and disturbed by what they see as a further ghettoization of the documentary form.”

As I was reading the article, I was feeling like some of us (myself included) come across as quite snarky about the whole thing. I can’t hold back when it comes to Moore; in a typical fashion, he couldn’t bother to comment for Anthony’s article, which just adds fuel to my snark about the man. But as Thom Powers says at the end of the article, “When you have a curated event, you’re building a relationship with the audience. When they have a couple of good experiences, then they don’t have to be sold on each title individually.” I was a season pass holder for Thom’s excellent Stranger Than Fiction series in New York and would gladly promote something similar in cities across America.

One of my longtime friends for my days at the Center for Social Media, Simon Kilmurry who works with P.O.V. and has been a long-time advocate of the fair use project, reminded me that I should post about the news that National Union, a member company of AIG, will now be accepting fair use claims that are made based on the Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use and accompanied by a letter from a lawyer. I did post about this over at Renew Media but as I had promised here that I would keep cross-posting to a minimum, I didn’t. But Simon is correct that this is very important and if you aren’t reading Re:Sources, I should provide the scoop here. So, apologies for any lapse in reporting!

The Trades covered the story as well, so it must be true. Also, Larry Lessig announced it on his blog which also makes it true for a lot of folks. If you are a filmmaker and were waiting for the powers that be to annoint your user rights, there you have it.

A small PS – Lessig announced legal clinic assistance to filmmakers for their fair use claims, but also, Peter Jaszi’s clinic at the Washington College of Law as well as Jennifer Urban at USC, among others, have been doing this since the Statement was released. I also have a list of lawyers who understand utilizing fair use and have done so for other filmmakers, so there is help out there! But this kind of assistance doesn’t mean you don’t have to be smart about communication law yourself, so get Michael Donaldon’s book, Clearance & Copyright