AWARDS
2013 AFI Docs – Official Selection, 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival – Official Selection, 2013 Hamptons International Film Festival – Official Selection

SYNOPSIS
If You Build It documents a year in an experimental high school classroom of the architectural program "Studio H." The film tracks the program's pioneers, Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller, as they build the innovative studio from the ground up. They work tirelessly to give the teens of a crumbling rural town a chance to build a better future for themselves and their community.

AWARDS
2013 Arica Nativa Film Festival Chile – Best Feature;
2013 St. Louis International Film Festival – Documentary Excellence Special Mention; 2014 Big Sky Film Festival – Big Sky Award;
2014 Alliance of Women Film Journalists' EDA Awards – Special Mention for Documentary Excellence;
2014 Wild & Scenic Film Festival – Jury Award, Best in Theme;
2014 Durango Independent Film Festival – Jury Award

SYNOPSIS
The promise of jobs from a proposed uranium mill has an economically devastated mining community in Colorado hopeful for the first time in decades. When environmentalists step in to stop the mill, pro-mill advocates are enraged. A debate ensues, pitting jobs against health and the environment. Without judgment, both sides of the issue are brought to life in heart-wrenching detail as the film follows conflicting opinions and visions for the future. The film offers no easy answers but aims instead to capture personal stories and paint a portrait of the lives behind this nuanced and complex issue.

AWARDS
Wild & Scenic Film Festival – Jury Honorable Mention; Green Film Fest in Seoul – Jury Award, Audience Award; Cinema Verde Film Festival – Most Uplifting Film Award

SYNOPSIS
Truck Farm tells the story of a new generation of quirky urban farmers. Viewers are trucked across New York to see the city's funkiest urban farms, and to find out if America's largest city can learn to feed itself. Blending serious exposition with serious silliness, Truck Farm entreats viewers to ponder the future of urban farming, and to consider whether sustainability needs a dose of whimsy to be truly sustainable. Featuring chef Dan Barber, nutritionist Marion Nestle, explorer Henry Hudson and a very lonely seagull. With musical narration by The Fishermen Three.

AWARDS
2013 San Antonia Film Festival – Official Selection, 2013 DC Labor Film Festival – Official Selection, 2013 Newseum – Selected Screening

SYNOPSIS
Black and White and Dead All Over is an in-depth look at the newspaper industry as it struggles to remain financially viable and to keep the presses rolling. Through the voices of prominent journalists including Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and David Carr of the New York Times, an industry is revealed in the midst of a financial death spiral, as readers abandon print for online news sources.

Publishers and editors desperately trying to create a sustainable business model for their dying papers. This film examines the importance journalism has on our society by following two fearless investigators into the badlands of North Philadelphia. With the economic crisis in the newsroom threatening to shutter their struggling tabloid, these courageous women bring down a dangerous and corrupt narcotics squad. If the American newspaper dies, who will conduct investigative journalism, who will hold public officials accountable?

AWARDS

• 2011 Environmental Film Fest at Yale – Grand Jury Prize
• 2011 SXSW Film Festival – Official Selection
• 2011 Mountainfilm Telluride – Official Selection
• 2011 Independent Film Festival Boston – Official Selection

SYNOPSIS
The City Dark is a feature documentary about light pollution and the disappearing night sky. Exploring the threat of killer asteroids in Hawaii, tracking hatching turtles along the Florida coast, and rescuing injured birds on Chicago streets, this film unravels the myriad implications of a globe glittering with lights.

AWARDS

• 2015 – The Unforgettables Award at the Cinema Eye Honors Awards
• USA, 2014 – Best Documentary Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival
• 2014 – Special Jury Prize for Extraordinary Courage in Filmmaking at the Little Rock Film Festival

SYNOPSIS
In 2006, Matt VanDyke, a timid 26-year-old with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, left home in Baltimore and set off on a self-described "crash course in manhood." He bought a motorcycle and a video camera and began a multi-year, 35,000-mile motorcycle trip through Northern Africa and the Middle East. With a gun in one hand and a camera in the other, Matt fought in – and filmed – the war until he was captured by Gaddafi's forces and held in solitary confinement for six months. Two-time Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry tells this harrowing and sometimes humorous story of a young man's search for political revolution and personal transformation.

AWARDS

• 2013 Sundance Film Festival – Official Selection
• 2013 AFI Docs Film Festival – Closing Night
• 2013 Human Rights Film Festival – Opening Night
• 2013 Hot Docs Film Festival – Official Selection
• Special Presentation International Premiere

SYNOPSIS
Twenty years after a poised young law professor sent shockwaves through the nation, Academy Award winner Freida Mock seeks to explore sexist power dynamics, unraveling the lightning-rod moment in Anita Hill's life and the broader discussion of gender inequality in America.

AWARDS

• 2014 Texas Indie Film Festival — Best Documentary
• 2014 Salem Film Festival — Alliance of Women Film Journalists (AWFJ)
• Best Female-Directed Documentary (Nominated)
• 2014 Hot Docs Toronto — Official Selection, World Premiere
• 2014 Raindance — Official Selection, UK Premiere
• 2014 Raindance Berlin — Official Selection
• 2014 New Horizons Film Festival, Wroclaw, Poland — Official Selection, European Premiere
• 2014 Baltimore Film Festival — Official Selection
• 2014 EPOS International Art Film Festival, Tel Aviv — Official Selection

SYNOPSIS
Everybody Street illuminates the lives and work of New York's iconic street photographers and the incomparable city that has inspired them for decades. The documentary pays tribute to the spirit of street photography through a cinematic exploration of New York City, and captures the visceral rush, singular perseverance and at times immediate danger customary to these artists.

AWARDS

• 2013 Santa Barbara International Film Festival – Audience Choice Award Best Feature
• 2013 Maui Film Festival – Audience Award Best Documentary
• 2012 Naples International Film Festival – Audience Award
• 2012 Austin Film Festival – Audience Award Best Documentary
• 2013 Vali Film Festival – Best Documentary

SYNOPSIS
Spinning Plates is a documentary about three extraordinary restaurants and the incredible people who bring them to life. A world-renowned chef competes for the ultimate restaurant prize in Chicago, while privately battling a life-threatening condition. A 150-year-old restaurant in Iowa is still standing only because of an unbreakable bond with the community. And a fledgling Mexican restaurant in Tucson struggles as its owners risk everything to survive and provide for their young daughter. Their unforgettable stories of family, legacy, passion and survival come together to reveal how meaningful food can be, and the power it has to connect us to one another.

The Fourth American Independence Film Festival starts in Kyiv Cinema (19 Velyka Vasylkivska St) on May 21. The schedule of screenings is up on your web-site in FILM PROGRAM 2015 section.

The film laboratory for young filmmakers Indie Lab will take place for the second time as part of the American Independence Film Festival. Indie Lab is a series of workshops on creating documentary films for the young Ukrainian documentary filmmakers. The workshops are conducted by the American and Ukrainian professionals. The participants learn documentary film directing and editing, development of protagonists' storylines, dramaturgy structure, and specifics of presenting different points of view in a short documentary film. As a result of Indie Lab's work, 10 short film will be presented.

The creators of films follow lives of Ukrainians in Kyiv and other cities of Ukraine, they examine the modern democracy process, civil society development, and investigate the deeper causes of such occurrences in Ukraine.

The second session of the laboratory will take place on May 18–25, 2015. During the second session Indie Lab will hold the events open to the public: practical seminars and lectures from American filmmakers, documentary films screenings and panel discussions. The screening of the 10 Indie lab shorts will take place during the American Independence Film Festival closing, as well as in other Ukrainian cities during various events organized by the partner organizations.

Do you want to know the way the policeman who swore not to betray the people of Ukraine feels, or to participate in a fight against illegal buildings together with the community of Kyiv? Do you want to learn how to be a cossack from Mikhaylo Havryliuk and touch the wisdom of Tatar people? To feel the rhythm of the Kharkiv military hospital under your skin, or see pro-Russian Donetsk through the eyes of an 18-year-old man? To turn into a Ukrainian painter for a moment or an ordinary resident of a Ukrainian village during elections? All of this and much more you will see in documentary shorts which are being made by the young Ukrainian filmmakers in Indie Lab.

Michael C. Donaldson has been fighting for independent filmmakers for over thirty years. Dubbed the "legal Obi Wan Kenobi' and fair use guru of the documentary film set" by the American Bar Association, Michael has gained a national reputation as an expert on clearance- and rights-related issues. His work covers financing, production, and distribution in the U.S. and around the world.

While serving as the President of the International Documentary Association, he successfully negotiated with the cable networks to prevent the wholesale migration of credits from the screen to the Internet by organizing and leading the Documentary Credit Coalition. Michael currently serves on the Advisory Committee of the Stanford Fair Use Project. Michael is also General Counsel to Film Independent (home of the Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival) and to the Writers Guild Foundation. He successfully negotiated with Media Professional Insurance Company to offer fair use riders on the E&O insurance policies which has allowed many films to be made under the fair use doctrine. He helped the IDA file, argue, and win an exemption to the DMCA, allowing Documentary Filmmakers access to public domain material for the purpose of their documentary pursuant to fair use. Michael also helped draft the Rome Resolution to harmonize Fair Use across the European Union as well as Orphan Works legislation. Michael most recently testified before House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet on Orphan works. Michael is the author of Clearance & Copyright: Everything You Need to Know for Film and Television, which is now in its third edition and used in over fifty film schools across the nation, as well as many other books.

An American documentary filmmaker Ian Cheney will be the festival guest and will conduct a workshop. Moreover, Ian will present his film City Dark and Truck Farm, and will answer the questions after the screenings.

Ian Cheney is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. He grew up in New England and earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Yale University. He co-created and starred in the Peabody Award-winning theatrical and PBS documentary King Corn (2007); directed the feature documentary The Greening of Southie (Sundance Channel, 2008); co-produced the Planet Green documentary Big River (2009); and directed the whimsical 2011 documentary Truck Farm, starring the farm Cheney planted in the back of his '86 Dodge pickup. He has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Men's Journal, as well as on CNN, MSNBC and ABC's Good Morning America. Cheney is a co-founder of FoodCorps, a national service program launched in 2011 that places young people in communities of need to plant and tend school gardens, teach nutrition education and source healthful foods for school cafeterias. In 2011, Cheney and longtime collaborator Curt Ellis received the Heinz Award for their innovative approach to environmental advocacy. Cheney travels frequently to show his films, lead discussions and give talks about sustainability, agriculture and the human relationship to the natural world. He is currently working on two projects: The Search for General Tso, a documentary about the cultural history of Chinese food in America, and Bluespace, a feature documentary about the degradation and renewal of urban waterways and the search for water in outer space.