Jon Alpert at Traverse City

Last week, DCTV director Jon Alpert attended the Traverse City Film Festival with unexpected results. Invited as a panelist and to present China's Unnatural Disaster: the Tears of Sichuan Province, the festival took a surprising turn as a select group of the participants met to discuss the current state of documentary work and its future in cinemas. Despite the dwindling presence of documentaries in theaters, the summit was inspirational and led to a proposal that represents a potential paradigmatic shift in how documentarians approach theatrical distribution.

It was a warm midwest evening on Lake Michigan and the mosquitoes were out in force. A group of filmmakers, including Alpert, Josh Fox (GasLand), Michael Webber (The Elephant in the Living Room), Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith (The Most Dangerous Man in America), brought together by Michael Moore (Capitalism: A Love Story, Sicko), met to share their insights into the state of their art and to plan for the future. The participants universally recognized that the documentary form has fallen on hard times: revenues have been in decline since the recent boom in the industry and the opportunities for theatrical distribution are shrinking. Not only is this worrying in terms of profitability, but several of the filmmakers, including Alpert and Moore, expressed dismay at the loss of the cinema experience. Moore remarked that the cinema is a irreplaceable social experience and that losing it, especially for documentaries, can only hurt a film's impact.

Despite the current state of the industry, the filmmakers looked to heartening facts to bolster their optimism for the future. The State Theater, Traverse City's independent movie house, often exhibiting documentaries, is regularly the highest-grossing theater in the country. New technologies allow filmmakers to reach niches previously inaccessible, and the Internet allows unique audience interaction on a global scale. The filmmakers proposed an "American Movie Night," where, once a week, viewers could tune in, in a theater, on TV or the web for a documentary selected by a panel and join in an online discussion with the rest of the community. An owner of an independent cinema chain has already expressed interest in the project.

After taking the first steps to rethinking the process of distribution, the group decided to convene again at DCTV in New York tomorrow, August 12th. DCTV is excited to be hosting what could be the seeds of a new era of documentary film.

In addition to participating in the documentary summit, Alpert presented the Michigan premiere of China's Unnatural Disaster: the Tears of Sichuan Province to a packed theater, as well as a special presentation of excerpts from his career. Alpert presented "The History of the World According to Jon Alpert" to a crowd of hundreds, taking the audience around the world, from the Middle East to Cuba, Venezuela to Michigan and everywhere in between. As part of the festival's film school, he led a workshop on documentary ethics, offering real-life examples of the split-second ethical judgments a filmmaker must make in the field. The festival recognized Alpert's incredible contribution to the industry, Michael Moore remarking, "Jon Alpert was an early inspiration of mine. I had never seen such a brave filmmaker just dive into a story and use his camera to extract the truth. He went where others were afraid to go. His short films were amazing and I remember thinking to myself as a young man, 'I want to do what he's doing.'"

The Traverse City Film Festival is always exceptional, and this year was no different. Alpert highly recommends it to filmmakers at every stage of their career and said his experience, particularly at The State and meeting with other like-minded filmmakers, was inspirational and reinforced the urgency and potential of DCTV's Doc House as a theatrical home for the documentary.