Documentary funding can be a bit of a black box. Who gets funding and why certain projects get backed while other apparently strong projects are left by the wayside is a reliable topic for heated discussion whenever any two independent producers meet.

The goal posts always seem to be shifting. Funding decisions are inevitably subjective, often political, and producers must chart a route through a seemingly byzantine application process to grasp what looks like an increasingly slender slice of the funding pie.

Of the clutch of films - all documentaries - that I saw at The Vancouver International Film Festival there was an impressive range in content and style. I just wish I’d been able to watch more - it wrapped on Friday.

Further to my earlier VIFF documentary reviews, here’s my second set of reviews:

The Vancouver International Film Festival got underway tonight with the Opening Gala, The Hummingbird Project.

There are 216 feature films and 120 shorts screening between now and 12th October.  

Here’s my short reviews of three of the 61 documentaries showing at the festival: 

The Vancouver International Film Festival picked a good time to host an industry event on Virtual Reality today. With characteristic fanfare, Google just unveiled a budget VR headset and controller, Daydream View. Daydream is Google’s virtual reality platform, coming next month.

As broadcast and cable television series have proliferated we’ve seen a massive growth in the dramatic web series.

One of the panels at VIFF Industry on Friday focused on two very different web series in terms of style and content: Carmilla is a contemporary vlog style adaptation of a 19th century Gothic vampire novella about a young woman preyed upon by a lesbian vampire.

It’s both an exciting and scary time for content creators, no more so than in the field of the television series. In 2015, there are 400 original scripted series on television. How do you break through the noise to secure funding, and make a success for your show?

The seismic shifts that the internet is bringing about in the entertainment and media industry continued to concentrate minds on the second day of VIFF Industry.

The themes that speakers came back to were familiar ones: the old guard is rapidly slipping away. Business models are by necessity being re-invented. New stars are rising. Audiences fragmenting and exploding. For those nimble enough, opportunities abound. For producers and media companies trying to follow the traditional path, it will only get tougher.

How do you get your content “discovered”? This was the big question of the first day of VIFF Industry the 4-day adjunct event that runs alongside Western Canada’s main film festival, the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The second session of the final day at VIFF Industry was a one-on-one with fortysomething director Jay Duplass. Duplass gave a refreshingly candid account of the highs and lows in his career as he transitioned from no-budget films to big budget Hollywood productions.