ORONO – The form, function and future of documentary filmmaking is the focus of a special course to be offered at the University of Maine as a companion to the first annual Camden International Film Festival Sept. 29-Oct. 2 in Camden and Rockland.

The film festival will screen and study 20 independent documentaries. At least six award winning documentary makers will discuss their work with the film festival audience. The UMaine course, which includes attending the festival, will be a primer on documentaries from the perspectives of three university professors. Students will explore what documentaries are, what they are not, what they can be and how they are conceived, developed and produced, according to Michael Grillo, associate professor or art.

The festival “brings both films and filmmakers into a very public presence,” Grillo said, “and is an educational opportunity to work in harmony with it. Students who take the course will have an immersion into the films and an opportunity to interact with producers.”

Grillo will be joined by Tony Brinkley, associate professor of English and graduate coordinator, and Mike Scott, lecturer in new media at UMaine. Grillo and Brinkley have taught courses based on documentaries and Scott studies them to see how evolving new media technologies can redefine and reshape documentaries.

Three Saturday classes are scheduled 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturdays, Sept. 17, Sept. 24 and Oct. 15, on the Orono campus and in Camden, Rockland and the Hutchinson Center in Belfast. The title of the course is “Honoring the Independent Documentary: Highlighting the World’s Lesser Known Evils” and is offered through the UMaine Department of Continuing and Distance Education through the UMaine Division of Lifelong Learning.

Documentaries, the instructors say, have come a long way from the early days of “Nanook of the North” in 1922 and post-World War II government propaganda. Today, independent documentaries like “March of the Penguins” or Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911” are breaking into the mainstream media and challenging box office records. There also are documentaries like Ken Burn’s “The Civil War,” which kept American TV viewers riveted to their televisions in 1990, and a series of other popular independent films that depict historical events through non-fictional recreation using archives, photographs, actors and documents.

The four-day Camden film festival is planned as a yearly event and begins this fall by focusing on documentaries with issues ranging from the catastrophic effects of globalization and the International Monetary Fund on Third World countries to the atrocities of the displacement camps after the fall of Berlin and World War II, according to organizers.

The audience will have opportunities to discuss such issues with the makers of documentaries and academics. Filmmakers and speakers will hold question and answer sessions and informal discussions to help construct conversation.

In exploring the nature of documentaries as agents for effective cultural understanding and social engagement, students also will learn the critical language of film and video, so that they can actively participate in the Camden International Film Festival as savvy viewers and knowledgeable contributors to public discussions and continuing class sessions.

Grillo, Brinkley and Scott want to ask students to analyze exactly what documentaries are – a deceptively simple question with a complex answer.

What “ideological sensibilities” go into the making of such films and what is the point of view? asks Grillo. How does a documentary maker influence the viewer through clever camera angles, sound effects, use of montage or narration? Brinkley wonders.

For more information, call 581-3143. For information about the Camden Film Festival visit http://camdenfilmfest.org/.