THE TILLMAN STORY- Q and A.   THE TILLMAN STORY (USA, 2010) by director Amir Bar-Lev is a documentary about the football player Pat Tillman who gave up a multimillion dollar career in professional American football to go to war with the Army Rangers in 2002. He sacrificed personal success to fight alongside his brothers in war, a decision which for him was deeply personal. While in Iraq, Pat was tragically killed by ‘friendly fire’ (his own men). After his death he b...

THE TILLMAN STORY- Q and A.   THE TILLMAN STORY (USA, 2010) by director Amir Bar-Lev is a documentary about the football player Pat Tillman who gave up a multimillion dollar career in professional American football to go to war with the Army Rangers in 2002. He sacrificed personal success to fight alongside his brothers in war, a decision which for him was deeply personal. While in Iraq, Pat was tragically killed by ‘friendly fire’ (his own men). After his death he b...

After the intense (and enjoyable) experience of sitting through at least 15 documentary feature films over 4 days at the just concluded AFI-Discovery Channel Documentary Festival, the question organically arose: do documentaries really matter? As someone who trained in documentary filmmaking techniques (and who made a few, best to be forgotten non-fiction nothings) and an admirer of the stamina, grit and determination of the documentary filmmaker, my answer appeared more hopeful than det...

  It is one of the defining news stories of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars….when all-star football player Pat Tillman walked away from a multi-million dollar contact with the Arizona Cardinals in May 2002 to join the Army, he became an instant symbol of patriotic fervor following the events of 9-11. However, when his promising future ended in unexpected and unnecessary tragedy, the Tillman family refused to accept the “official” story being offered by the military and polit...

   The recent tragic events in Haiti have given an unexpected resonance to a new documentary on child sponsoring that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past weekend. A SMALL ACT by Jennifer Arnold looks at the modern day phenomenon of Westerners sponsorship and adoption of third world children.   With the Haitian crisis generating hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from almost every nation of the world, often by exploiting images of ...