IFP’s 33^rdIndependent Film Week kicked off yesterday with a slate of panels at Lincoln Center’s new Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center and continues through Thursday with a wide selection of screenings and panels. Its main event, Project Forum, gives emerging filmmakers the chance to share their projects with the industry. Some of this years most interesting sounding projects are:

• Man-Child – Ryan Koo’s look at a 13 year old basketball prodigy on the verge of super stardom that could make Kickstarter history.

• The Feast – Ed Gass-Donnelly’s follow up to the hypnotic Small Town Murder Songs is a musical about a mute girl who sells her soul to the devil.

•  The Light in Her Eyes – A documentary about a female Koran teacher in Damascus directed by Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix.

I’ve attended IFW every year since moving to New York in 2008 and it never disappoints. This year looks to have an enticing slate of films and panels; here are some of the highlights.  For tickets to these events and many more, please view the full schedule here or you can watch livestreams of some of the panels here.

Walking the Line - The Fine Art of Promoting Your Film (Monday, 11:00 am)

This panel features two of my favorite panelists on distribution – Sheri Candler and Ryan Werner. Sheri is a brilliant and passionate spokesperson for how filmmakers can use social media, her book Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul was released last week and is a must read, you can read it FOR FREE here until October 1^st.  Ryan Werner, Senior VP of Marketing at IFC/Sundance Selects, is just downright gangster on panels, I’ve seen him on probably half a dozen over the years and he always has insight into fests and distribution windows.   

Kinyarwanda – Opening night film (Monday, 7:30 pm)

Filmmaker Alrick Brown landed this year’s coveted opening night slot – which had Medicine for Melancholy in 2008 and Howl last year – with his tale of genocide and friendship that took the World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance this year. The film participated in the 2010 emerging narrative lab and now comes full circle for its New York premiere.

Paying The Bills (Tuesday, 11:00 am)

This one should be packed with indie filmmakers for obvious reasons. If you’re one of the few that doesn’t have trouble paying the bills, come anyway – Ursula Lawrence is engaging and insightful about film and new media. I’ve been on her panels at the Writers Guild East (where she oversees expanding the Guild’s membership in new media) and they were well-run and well-attended. I haven’t seen the other panelist, Gil Holland, but with 70 + films to his credit you can bet he has something to say.

Master Class - How to Mobilize an Audience (Thursday, 12:00 pm)

I’ve never seen Paulo Freccero speak on a panel but she was a mentor at last year’s labs and her bio looks interesting. She and her partner Liz Ogilvie are definitely on to something over at Crowdstarter where they are looking at new ways to reach audiences through social media. Nuff said. I’m in.

So that’s what looks most interesting to me this week. I’m bummed I missed Scott Macaulay and Ted Hope onstage yesterday, I heard it was fun. If you’re attending, drop me a line on the Facebook or Twitter and let me know what you saw and how it was.

For more in-depth coverage, Filmmaker Magazine has the week covered top to bottom here.  

Last February, while the world watched Hosni Mubarak’s regime crumble , one filmmaker spotted something in the crowd that changed the way he thought about stories and social media.

While watching the protests in Egypt last winter, documentary filmmaker Jigar Mehta was struck by the images of Egyptians holding up their cell phones during rallies. “It dawned on me,” he said over coffee recently, “that there are millions of people that just documented this pivotal moment – let’s try to figure out a way to tell these stories.”  

 Jigar scrambled to assemble a team with a presence in both Silicon Valley and Cairo and, over the next eight months, developed ways to enable social media fragments such as video, photos, audio clips, and tweets to become stories. They called their project 18 Days in Egypt. Somewhere in the course of their work, though, Jigar and his team realized they had something on their hands that went beyond Egypt. “The more we looked at what we had, we realized Wow, there is a way to do group-based storytelling around any event – from the uprising in Egypt to your sister’s wedding.”

For a filmmaker with an acute sense of the impact social media has had on film, Jigar’s background is surprisingly old-media.  He studied documentary filmmaking under Jon Else at Berkeley and worked for the New York Times for five years. Now, looking back on those years, it’s clear he was watching the walls for cracks all along. “At the Times, we would need someone in, say, Azerbaijan, and we could fly someone out. But there is someone there who has those skills already – we just don’t know who that person is. We needed a way to connect to him or her.”

It was this need that landed Jigar at Stanford in late 2010 on a Knight Fellowship studying collaborative journalism, “I went in with a project where the idea was to develop a way to connect video journalists around the world.” And perhaps that’s what he would still be doing, were it not for those fateful 18 Days last February. Now, with a promising write-up in Mashable and an invitation to the 2011 Startup Bootcamp in Copenhagen, the project has the potential to become a poster-child for social filmmaking. I sat down with him recently to discuss his experience with 18 Days and his plans for the future.

You began your career working for the New York Times, can you talk about how that experience shaped you as both a filmmaker and journalist?

 In 2005 the Times dissolved its marriage with the Discovery Channel and decided to reboot their video unit in-house…

Read more …

In CATFISH, a new mock (or not) umentary by Henry Joost and brothers Nev and Ariel Schulman, a struggling filmmaker embarks on a quest to find out the truth about a girl he’s met on Facebook; An engaging premise if, for no other reason, because it prods and pokes (no pun intended) at the social network in ways “the other Facebook movie” didn’t. Namely – how much of anything anyone puts up there is real?

The narrative in CATFISH is…Read the rest of the review at FILMSNOBBERY.COM

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that social media will be a huge factor in deciding the 2012 presidential election. In the last election, it’s arguable that it was the deciding factor. The Obama campaign’s use of Twitter, Facebook and mobile technologies made other candidate’s efforts look downright stone age. It’s true that his chief social media strategist was Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook (which is sort of like bringing Derek Rose to a Thursday night basketball league) but it wasn’t just Hughes’ genius that propelled the campaign, Obama’s supporters in general were an exceedingly social media savvy group and were one step ahead of other candidates (including other democrats - I know, I worked for one) at every turn.

But that was when social media was still new, still young like the generation the Obama campaign so succesfully energized. It was the perfect meeting of message (change!) and medium (new!) This time around that isn’t the case, the waters have settled, the two leading platforms have established themselves more firmly now and everyone from the guy who lives on your dorm room couch and may or may not actually go to your college to your mother, blogs/tweets/foursquares etc.

So what does that mean for candidates hoping to win the Social Media Circus, er, Caucus in 2012? In short: Be, well…short. Social media has gotten faster and shorter, mainly due to the popularity of Twitter and other forms of micro-blogging. Even two years ago a “blog” was something you pretty much wrote, now many popular bloggers just post a photo or video to a page and write a caption, letting the meat of their blog be the audience’s response.

And the shorter the message gets, the better things get for one candidate: Sarah Palin. Palin was made for 140 characters or less. Much more than that, and she stumbles - like she did with Katie Couric or when asked to explain her association with a group that wants Alaska to secede from the union - but when she sticks to message (Extend Bush Tax breaks! Repeal Obamacare!) she is a Social Media Strategists hanging curve ball and may represent the same sort of happy marriage between message and medium that Obama’s campaign did in ‘08.

Another reason she will win the Social Media war in ‘12? No one wants Chris Hughes’ job this time around. It would take a Dostoevskyian tweet to explain healthcare, and anyone wanna make a meme about the bailout and see how many of your friends email it around? But Palin winning at Social Media isn’t a layup by a long shot. The Obama folks, and the dems in general, have one considerable advantage: Most of their supporters are already users of social media, which is arguably less true about members of the Tea Party. Converting Palin’s base from Mama Grizzlies to Mama Grizzlies who Tweet! will be a challenge.

Going through my inbox this morning I noticed an email from a marketer that had somehow wrangled its way through my Gmail’s spam filters. On my way to deleting it, it’s subject line caught my eye, “Local Interviews with the CIA Analyst Hiring Division.”

I’ve posted the body of the email below, off the bat there are several things I find disturbing about it. One, that the CIA is outsourcing its hiring at all. Two, that it’s outsourcing it to a spam-bot. And three, that the spam-bot in question isn’t even a good one. It didn’t catch, for example, the fact that I barely copped a 3.0 in college, or that my first name is Rameshwaran - something that never fails to get me to second base with the TSA officer every time I board an airplane.

In the words of Seth Myers: Really CIA? Really?

The email in question begins here…

Be a CIA Analyst . Use your intelligence and critical thinking skills to protect your nation while building a great career. As an analyst, you’ll be responsible for providing timely, insightful assessments to US decision makers and others in the intelligence community.

To qualify, you need a strong academic record and excellent communication skills. Two or more years of relevant analytical experience are desired.

Applicants must have US citizenship and the ability to successfully complete medical examinations and security procedures, including a polygraph interview. The CIA is an equal opportunity employer and a drug-free work place.

CIA has a special need for analytical methodologists, targeting analysts, military analysts and economists.  For additional information on these and all analytic positions and to apply, click here.