Documentary specialist Icarus Films have grabbed the rights to Patricio Guzmán's latest - a Cannes preemed documentary film, that is heading to TIFF next week and will be set up with a 2011 theatrical release.

When you have a distributor who brings to market a select few documentary items, then one would have to think that their might be something special about Vadim Jendreyko’s The Woman with the Five Elephants. The Cinema Guild have picked up the well travelled doc which was featured in the Hot Docs, Viennale, Locarno, Rotterdam and at the AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs Film Festival where it picked up the Sterling Award for a World Feature. Expect an early 2011 release.

In October we'll be applying both Freakonomics, and with Ray Griggs' I Want Your Money we'll have an animated and talking heads 101 on Reaganomics and Obamanomics. To be released during political banter season (10.15), Freestyle Releasing are looking for a money maker with this docu which focuses on two versions of the American dream...that with the arrival of Obama shows the deep contrasts.

If you didn't manage to catch it in theaters earlier this year via Lorber Films, Erik Gandini's Videocracy, a 2009 Venice and TIFF selection is now available for free via SnagFilms. Part of their annual Summer Screening Series, for a limited time only, you can see how the Berlusconi (the media mogul and then politician) went T&A with its television programming

While the last decade has been a prosperous one for the Israeli film industry with the output of quality feature "fiction" films, the Israeli documentary scene is creating an even a bigger buzz. About 20 fiction features are created each year in Israel and the number of annual Israeli documentaries is more than a double that number. This year, a pair of Ophir Award nominated documentaries are receiving a lot of buzz-worthy attention.

We got a brief overview of some of the documentary films we'll be surely talking about circa 2011. Thom Powers headed over to Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Festival and in his fifth edition dispatch he reveals some projects that I'll be keeping tabs on - as some will surely be ready for my annual trip to Sundance next year.

In a deal that has been worked out for some time now, before becoming a collectible the home vid market, Lorber Films will give the well-aged 2006 preemed doc film that celebrates the life and music of Harry Nilsson at short release commencing at the Cinema Village. Directed by John Scheinfeld and in the same style as The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why is Everybody Talkin' About Him)? which opens on the second Friday of September, is a talking heads docu.

If you'd want to follow Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank with a future recommended viewing, I don't think I'd be too off topic in suggesting Strand Releasing's latest pick-up. Described by Eric Kohn as a "document of grief", Clio Barnard's The Arbor, is an innovative portrait of playwright Andrea Dunbar, who at the age of fifteen wrote a play that would be performed in NYC and it basically describes her experiences as a pregnant teenager with an abusive drunken father.

You say that David Lynch is your favorite director? Then prove it. What the world needs now is a third documentary film on the master filmmaker, hence LYNCHThree is in the funding stage mode and the unnamed filmmakers have set up pretty cool way to grab your cold hard cash.

The trades are reporting that Macdonald (part documentarian and part feature filmmaker) is teaming with Ridley Scott and YouTube to create what is being dubbed "the first user-generated feature-length documentary."

International Film Circuit - the top notch indie sized doc film distributor (they also do features - Shotgun Stories, etc.) have picked up the distribution rights to a film I missed out on at Sundance, but under different circumstances would have wanted to have seen. Rob Lemkin's and Thet Sambath's Enemies of the People - is a cold hard look into the past, more specifically a portrait of those involved in the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Lorber Films are plugging their autumn schedule with Peter Raymont and Michèle Hozer's Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, a doc that was first showed at TIFF.

Oscilloscope Laboratories have picked up a companion film of sorts to the acquisition they made in April with Howl which is set for a late September release. Yony Leyser's docu William S. Burroughs: A Man Within will be set for a fall theatrical release and ties in perfectly with the Ginsberg flick - as they were both the founding members of the Beat Generation.

Boxing Gym will commence its theatrical run starting at the IFC Center thanks to a joint release between mTuckman media and Wiseman's Zipporah Films (both recently paired on the very successful theatrical run of La Danse—The Paris Opera Ballet.

The Cinema Guild have picked up the distrib rights to Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol -- a docu film which premiered at the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature. Cinema Guild will put the doc on their Fall slate, but before that the company will let the film continue on its winning ways on the film fest circuit this Summer.

Days after being announced as part of Cannes' Special Screening selections (mostly a mix of documentary films), now comes the press release announcement that Sony Pictures Classics have been an integral part of the production to Charles Ferguson latest documentary. Titled Inside Job, Ferguson who tackled the much-maligned U.S foreign policy in No End in Sight, takes a closer look at what brought about the financial meltdown with Matt Damon narrating.

Among the films that I'm expecting to see selected for a place on the Croisette this year is what can be called an "ethnographic" docu-fiction account. Reading up on the filmmaker's approach, you'd think that the film was helmed by a mainland Chinese filmmaker or a Latin American director, but Italian born Frammartino simply located himself in his own familiar surroundings, more specifically the place that foreigners would know as the "toe" portion of the boot shaped Italy.

A docu film that shares the same underground prestige as Todd Haynes' Superstar and has been called one of the best documents on Rock & Roll by Jim Jarmusch may finally be making a premiere this year, almost 38 years or so after the fact. Photographer Robert Frank's cinéma vérité styled Cocksucker Blues was a docu on the Rolling Stone's 1972 American tour which never saw the light of day because the band perhaps thought it too honest of a portrait to be released (the camera does not lie), but in today's world comes across as trivial rock star antics.

Something tells me today's Magnolia Pictures pick-up was already a done deal type of announcement - I say this because with the exception of his Oscar-winning doc that THINKFilm ceremoniously short-changed Alex Gibney, the distributor and the doc filmmaker have had a great working relationship.

Arthouse Films, the documentary film specialist have picked up an award-winning documentary film from both the Sundance & Berlin Film Festivals in Lucy Walker’s Waste Land. Along with Michael Winterbottom, she was one of the rare filmmakers to present not one, but a pair of films in Park City this year. Walker went from landfills to the end of the world question with Countdown to Zero.