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From speed typing to horse jumping, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Rendez-vous With French Cinema serves up its 18th year from February 28th through March 10th. Kurt Brokaw chooses his favorites, at least one, he says, may make your heart melt "into your knees."

According to Film Festival Academy co-founder Tomas Prasek, "I have seen so much useless competition in areas where collaboration would have benefited both parties...everybody says, ‘How do other festivals deal with that?’ and that's exactly what people should be asking through some kind of platform." He recently told The Independent's Courtney Sheehan why professionals could benefit from playing on the same team.

Maybe you're drawn to character-driven stories, maybe you're just drawn to characters as The Independent's Erin Trahan was on her first trip to Sundance. Here's a sketch of her mostly but not exclusively human encounters.

Neil Kendricks sizes up three award-winning documentaries from the Sundance line-up: Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer, Cutie and the Boxer, and American Promise. The latter two, he writes, "deliver life-affirming and memorable stories without surrendering to sentimentality or phony uplift."

From data visualization to augmented realities, Sundance's New Frontier program served up technology in both virtual and real spaces. Senior producer Maddy Kadish, and dozens before and after her, left fingerprints all over the interactive exhibits.

Sci-fi, technology, and the apocalypse rule supreme in the array of short format programs at Sundance 2013. Neil Kendricks teases out the program's terrain—from emotionally detached to resonant. Jesse Atlas' Record/ Play and Jon Hurst's When Zombies Come were among his favorites.

Filmmakers Liz Canner and David Tames, photographers Aimee Spinks and Mikki Ansin, and film journalist Erin Trahan boil down the points of why capturing still photos should be a high priority during production.

"Koch is one of us. He's family," writes Kurt Brokaw about the documentary that lifts up the imperfect politician. Koch is among Brokaw's critic's choices from the 22nd New York Jewish Film Festival, screening at Lincoln Center from January 9-24, 2013.

Friends, it's never easy to ask for money. And the end-of-the-year actions we take as routine feel even more delicate this year... yet our readers always rise to the challenge. Sometimes it's with financial donations, sometimes with an encouraging note (or video!) attached to your donation, sometimes it's by suggesting The Independent to a friend. We thank you for giving us a community to serve that celebrates independent storytelling.

Focusing on this year’s music documentary programming, LJ Kessels observes the accidental nature of finding one’s subject and the attention a filmmaker needs to have to bring about the story. This year she found a common theme among music docs: redeeming forgotten artists.

NOMINATING DEADLINE EXTENDED to FEBRUARY 4th! Spam bots have attacked our webform! You need more time! Please send nominee name, contact, bio, and reason for nomination to maddy AT independent-magazine DOT org. Thanks one and all.

Hailed as one of the most important Israeli documentaries of recent years, Arnon Goldfinger's The Flat exposes family secrets and raises moral questions which Goldfinger recently discussed with a non-fiction theory class taught by USC's Michael Renov. Reported by Wendy Dent, who premieres her family-inspired film December 25 at IDFA.

Beth Toni Kruvant's David Bromberg: Unsung Treasure, Jorge Hinojosa's Iceberg Slim: Portrait Of A Pimp, and the pot-stirring Ken Burns/Sarah Burns/David McMahon doc, The Central Park Five, are Kurt Brokaw's critic's choices from DOC NYC. The third annual all-documentary festival takes place November 8-15, 2012.

Festival du Nouveau Cinema's Philippe Gajan explains how web docs are new media and not just documentaries on the web: "The place of the viewer is completely different now. You can choose the way you participate in the documentary." The Independent's Patrick Pearce gets the whole scoop on how the definition of nouveau changes from year to year.