Guest filmmakers and delegates from Iran, this year’s Spotlight country, discuss their projects and the conditions for making documentaries in their homeland.

Even as technology gives filmmakers the tools to mash, remix, sample, and satirize, the creative license to do so is stifled by the restrictive terms of powerful copyright holders’ vision of the law. A presentation and discussion of the potential and challenges of Open Source Cinema.

Outstanding Achievement honouree Richard Leacock has described his goal in shooting documentaries to convey “the feeling of being there.” Leacock and other guest filmmakers discuss this and other notions of practicing documentary cinematography.

The “longitudinal” documentary - films which follow their subjects and stories over years - is an increasingly rare form. In this discussion, guest filmmakers who have made such works discuss what it takes to stay with the story and to tell it in ninety minutes.