A documentary film project that I've been keeping tabs on since I first heard about it last February, is not surprisingly, causing quite the stir. Rezo Films' The Game of Death, a docu experiment that filmed knowing, and unknowing participants in a mock game show that mimicked Stanley Milgram's famed experiment -- but this time in the context of reality television.

If I'm the film distributor who picked up Exit Through the Gift Shop for the U.S theatrical play, I'd probably go underground as well. As an artist who purposely "guns down" all forms of branding, it would be odd for a distributor to come in and swoop up the rights to the docu film.

Recent winner for Best Documentary at the Césars (the French Oscars), Serge Bromberg's and Ruxandra Medrea's Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno has been picked up theatrically for the play in the U.S. (via The Flicker Alley - I never heard of you guys) - I'm imagining a traveling, art-house circuit release for the doc.

Zeitgeist Films are partnering once again with the folks that produced Up the Yangtze - returning to the same country but instead of the brown waters of the Yangtze, this journey takes place in and on the sides of the train tracks.

Part of a double docu Sundance and New Directors/New Films selected pick-up, Zeitgeist have acquired The Oath from helmer Laura Poitras and have pegged it with a release sometime this May. This makes it two for two between the distributor and Poitras - they last paired on the release of My Country, My Country in 2006.

I caught a screening of the doc, a couple of years back at the Toronto Film Festival, and if I remember correctly, this became a Weinstein co. title that never got released - it's finally receiving a release on VOD via Sundance Selects on March 10th. A must see for WWII history buffs and Macdonald fans.

Having received big film festivals premieres at both Sundance and Berlin, it's now time for Exit Through the Gift Shop to receive a warm, homecoming welcome in a place that is naturally more in tune with where the artist produces some of his canvas work. Forget about the multiplex, The Guardian reports that "a tunnel beneath Waterloo train station in London" is the lieu of the London premiere...

At the end of the day, the goal of IONCINEMA.com is to celebrate and promote the process, and this is why Ismailos' Great Directors might interest our readers - she interviews such auteurs as Bernardo Bertolucci, Stephen Frears, Agnes Varda, Ken Loach, Liliana Cavani, David Lynch, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater, Haynes and Sayles.

Strand Releasing will have their work cut out with their latest acquisition -- kind of hard to feel sorry for a fourteen year-old making more in a couple of hours of modeling work than what most people make in a full year.

Not sure if a nation that is constantly reminded of imminent fear (the airports and color alert levels are a joke) will want to hit the movie theaters and watch a film about the current nuclear threat that is bubbling up, but Magnolia Pictures are teaming up with Participant Media once again, grabbing Lucy Walker's documentary film that was just showcased at Sundance.

Paul Federbush and former Warner Independent Pictures's head Laura Kim are starting up a new distribution company going by the name of Red Flag Releasing and they'll get the business started with a Sundance doc that ruffled many feathers before anyone even laid eyes on the film. Much like how people invest in the stock market, perhaps the best time for new distribution companies to get into the action is when the industry is at low point, and they'll release a doc film with bite this Spring in Reed Cowan's 8: The Mormon Proposition.

Survival in the favelas by way of the ballet? That's what the Film Movement folks are proposing this summer as they become the official dance partners with Beadie Finzi's favela-set documentary film which appears to contain a rags-to denouement and could easily mimic the popularity of Mad Hot Ballroom.

Basing itself on the 60's experiment which showed how most people would give unbearable electric shocks to others when encouraged by an authority, Christophe Nick and Thomas Bornot’s documentary The Game Of Death, applies the same approach in the mock form of a TV game show. Adjectives such as amusing, compelling and disturbing come to mind.

The Weinsteins' grabbed the best film in the U.S Dramatic field in Blue Valentine (if you ask IndieWIRE pollsters) and now they've grabbed U.S. theatrical, DVD and pay TV rights, as well as all rights in English language territories rights to a doc film that many were buzzing about in Park City. Probbing

I hate that nagging feeling of having attended a film festival and having missed out on the buzz film -- as was the case with my trip to Sundance and my unattainable quest to see Catfish. The hype and build-up for Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's documentary was established on day one of its world premiere, and its been odd to see the a bidding war breakout and media questioning the truthfulness of the doc whose punch line I can guess at but would rather not know until I see it for myself.

Helmer Jo Sol's Fake Orgasm is based interviews done in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America. Sol attempts to find common answers that cross-cultural boundaries as to why three quarters of women say they're sexually dissatisfied and many fake orgasms. Personally, I'm already looking forward to the audio portion of the film.

Many would say that "what comes around goes around" certainly applies if you happen to be Silvio Berlusconi. As of late, the power hungry, media mogul and prime minister (he has returned to the same seat in three separate occasions) is having his private life go public, received a bloody nose, and chipped teeth last week and hasn't been fortunate on the film fest circuit either. In February we'll get a full exposé on how Berlusconi has "added" to Italian culture with Lorber Films picking up the rights to Erik Gandini’s doc Videocracy - a film that was among the favorites from film critics who attended TIFF and Venice.

When I predicted that Steven Soderbergh would come to Park City with his Spaulding Gray documentary, I was pegging it as a Sundance premiere, when in fact, the filmmaker who presented The Girlfriend Experience as a surprise screening last year, is renewing his rapport with the festival just down the street -- he once showed Schizopolis there.

If you ever wanted to find an irritable bunch of people working in Hollywood, you wouldn't have to go much further than the names in the screenwriter's directory. First Run Features have picked up the rights to Peter Hanson’s talking heads docu about the horror stories of those of who lived to tell the tale: contemporary screenwriters who got stung in their careers as scribes and consider themselves lucky, managed to see one of their works turn into a final product and retain some shards of its former self.

No stranger for grabbing docu films to fill their cable television slate, Icelandcinemanow.com reports that HBO have grabbed Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s documentary The Sunshine Boy for an eventual April 2nd release expanding into major cities.

Cinetic's FilmBuff and Vitagraph Films have announced a joint pick-up of, in my estimation, the best doc film coming out of this year's TIFF.

I'm sure that my parents who used the famine in Ethiopia guilt trip on me when I didn't want to finish my plate had no idea that they could throw in North Korea in their discourse.

Newly reconfigured, rebranded Lorber Films are hoping to join the Oscar pool with what on paper sounds like a throat-clearing type of doc film, but this uses a Calender Girls-ish premise to discuss human body deformity. Winner of 2009 Lola (German Film Award) for Best Documentary, Niko von Glasow's Nobody's Perfect will receive a December release.

There is a little bit of irony to be found in the first official first pick-up among the doc films that played at TIFF. Sundance's newly formed theatrical distribution arm Sundance Selects has picked up the rights to a doc film that paints the Annenberg Foundation in unflattering, black-eye kind of manner.

The 22nd Tokyo International Film Festival will open with the highly anticipated, long-gestating, documentary film from Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud. I believe principal photography commenced something like five years ago on Oceans. The doc was picked up earlier this year by Disneynature for a Spring 2010 release.

Film Movement have picked up from Geralyn Pezanoski's Mine - the winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at SXSW, a docu that examines how we treat animals as an extension of how we view and treat each other.

If you want to get an early peek at some of the docu titles/docu subjects for future editions of the Sundance Film Festival, then grab an eyeful at the films and filmmakers that received grants from the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program.

Imagine if Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch had become president of the United States and they had an interest in putting bikini clad women on the airwaves.

Following up on from the vault releases of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (a pair of films which I have criminally still yet to see), Milestone Films has restored and presenting what is labeled as a Venezuelan Masterwork called Araya.

Is there a correlation between those who wear the latest trends and the popularity of fiction and non-fiction films that have fashion in the foreground? If we take a look at the numbers, all indicts oui, there is money to be made if the narrative or docu subject is somehow related to haute couture.

Michael Moore has settled on Capitalism: A Love Story as the title for his bailout documentary. To be released on the 2nd of October, and what should be a premiere gala screening at the Toronto Film Festival a couple of weeks beforehand, Moore explains the odd choice for a film title as "the perfect date movie....it's got it all -- lust, passion, romance and 14,000 jobs being eliminated every day. It's a forbidden love, one that dare not speak its name. Heck, let's just say it: It's capitalism."