News

The Jack the Ripper weather that blanketed part of the 24th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam this year seemed poetically apropos. Rushing from P&I screenings, to public showings, to private viewing booths I often felt like I was lost in a heavy fog of docs. In addition I took great advantage of the many behind-the-scenes and inside-scoop events — most free to the public — that gives this biggest doc fest in Europe its accessible community vibe. I watched a Talk Show with tabloid-deep Nick Broomfield discussing his Sarah Palin: You Betcha! over a live Internet feed. I attended in person a much more fascinating Meet the Makers with Steve James (ironically, the very same morning I learned that The Interrupters — which I’d predicted would nab this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary — shamefully got booted from the Oscar shortlist), who was being honored with a retrospective on...

Danfung Dennis, director of the 2011 Sundance documentary Hell And Back Again, is heading up immersive experience project Condition One, a mobile content technology startup which aims to reinvent war journalism by bringing viewers to the front lines of the Libyan conflict. Condition One's first beta demo, which features immersive video shot this month by photojournalist Patrick Chauvel from the Libyan desert near Ras Lanouf, shows up close and personal encounters with the rebel forces. "I mean I'm talking putting my life now on front line," a rebel in plain clothes explained in an interview. "But I don't care. Give me my freedom or give me my death. They are just asking to be free, to be human, to have dignity to live like any other people. Not under this fucking dictator." "It's a very sad story," Chauvel says. "These guys are students, they're hairdressers, they're bakers, bankers, philosophers, teachers. They are no military.

At the end of my profile of filmmaker Danfung Dennis in our 2010 “25 New Faces” feature, I touched on what was then his next project. After completing Hell and Back Again — winner of the World Cinema Jury Prize and World Cinema Cinematography Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival — Dennis embarked on Condition One, which he told me “will use a network of journalists, filmmakers and servicemen to send a stream of high-quality video to millions of mobile devices.”

Danfung’s new venture now has a website, a Facebook page and a proof-of-concept video that’s also 90 seconds of frontline reporting. Condition One’s reinvention of war journalism for the mobile age is provocative, mindblowing, awesome and even kind of scary in a Strange Days kind of way. Check it out below — and make sure to watch the whole clip.

From the Vimeo page:

The Libyan desert near Ras Lanouf

March, 2011

Demonstrations...