Here’s a fundraising idea that’s a bit more personal than the PBS totebag or umbrella — not that there is anything wrong with those things.

For a $1,000 tax-deductible donation, the executive board of the Independent Film Festival Boston will show up to your door and serenade you with a medley of holiday songs and 1980s pop hits.  And they do take requests.

“No Hannah Montana but Dan has High School Musical covered,” says managing director Nancy Campbell, “and we would prefer almost anything from Dr. Horrible or the 80’s.”

Fellow managing director Dan McCallum likes to channel Fred Schneider from The B-52’s, and his colleague Christine Harbaugh does some “killer Samantha Fox,” the artist who taught us that Naughty Girls Need Love, Too.

“You’ve never heard Heart’s “What About Love” sung as a duet but you really need to,” adds McCallum. “We are a 100-percent, volunteer-run non-profit organization, and blood, sweat and tears only go so far.”

Depending on availability, the IFFB crew will show up with between five and 15 singers. The gang has practiced together at karaoke bars and with the Harmonix Rock Band 2 video game.

One caveat: Your home must be reasonably accessible by the MBTA.  After all, very few independent filmmakers are independently wealthy.

Of course, like any nonprofit, the Independent Film Festival Boston would be grateful for donations of all amounts. Full details about their fundraising campaign are here.

And mark your calendars for the 2009 IFFB: It’s April 22-28 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and the Somerville Theater.

Framingham filmmaker Raouf Zaki won the Boston Comedy and Film Festival’s top honors two years ago with “Just Your Average Arab,” so maybe his latest effort, “Santa Claus in Baghdad” has a shot to achieve Rudolph and Frosty-level notoriety.

The movie, based on Newton author Elsa Marston’s book,“Figs and Fate: Stories About Growing Up in the Arab World,” took three years to make and some extremely imaginative set building.

The Iraqi classroom scenes were shot inside Framingham’s Danforth Museum, and a bustling Arab outdoor book market was recreated inside a giant warehouse on Tripp Street.

“We borrowed over 20,000 books from a local charity and set up a 10K light to simulate the sun,” explains Zaki. “We only had one day to set everything up due to shooting constraints, but thanks to the hard work of my production designer and his crew, we were able to get it all done.”

The movie tells the story of 16-year-old Amal, a girl who has fallen a year behind her classmates due to an illness. To pay tribute to a favorite literature teacher who is leaving the school, Amal makes a sacrifice to obtain the perfect book as a going-away gift.  Meanwhile, the little girl’s younger brother is convinced that a visiting American relative is really Santa Claus who will bring him toys.  When disappointment inevitably surfaces, the children’s father makes a sacrifice of his own to make the boy happy.

Here’s an excerpt of Zaki’s vision statement, elaborating how Marston’s short story inspired his film:

“I got really emotional because it was about a poor Iraqi girl and her little brother during the terrible embargo days and it was simply about giving. I mean we all remember the lack of medicine during the embargo days where people had to sell everything to survive.”

“The realities are even deeper than the film or the book, where some women turned into prostitutes to buy medicine, fathers had to beat up their own children so that they could be hospitalized just to be fed, and schools, well, every teacher was trying to flee Baghdad, and final exams had to be conducted on convenience store receipts because no one could afford blank paper. Not too long ago, however, the saying went, books were written in Egypt, published in Lebanon and read in Iraq.”

“I stood up and promised myself to turn the story into a film about a little girl, her brother and their story of decline from their social status, while hanging onto the spiritual and educational essentials, like old books, when everything else had been sold.”

“Santa Claus in Baghdad” will be touring college campuses and have other community screenings across the country this holiday season.  Upcoming local screenings include:

Friday, Dec. 5
2:30 pm
Framingham State College
College Center Forum
100 State Street, Framingham, MA

Sunday, Dec. 7 and Monday, Dec. 8
7 pm
Amazing Things Art Center
160 Hollis Street
Framingham, MA

Tuesday, Dec. 9

Special On-Line Screening for Educators

Email filmmaker@rcn.com
or call 508-788-0221 for additional information.

New York-based Howcast Studios, which was founded by former employees of YouTube and Google, is offering two free filmmaking workshops for college students who dream of producing the next viral video sensation.

The Web Video 101 workshops are:

Thursday, Nov. 20 at 7 p.m. — Boston University, COM building, 640 Commonwealth Avenue

Friday, Nov. 21 at noon — Emerson College, Multipurpose Room, 150 Boylston Street.

Howcast produces entertaining “How To” videos for hundreds of topics and distributes them on the Web with paid advertising. The company recruits filmmakers to shoot and edit their scripts, promising a 50-50 split of ad revenue if the viral video generates more than 40,000 hits.

Howcast’s Heather Menicucci, a Boston University grad, says she hopes to attract participants to enroll in their Emerging Filmmakers Program, but the workshops provide a general overview of producing skills, technical specs, distribution and promotion of Web videos.

WGBH unveils its new collaborative “ReelNative” project with PBS this Thursday, screening new Native American films at its Brighton studios and hosting a question and answer session with the filmmakers. The event, scheduled from 6:30-8:30 p.m., is free to the public but requires an RSVP here.

According to WGBH, the “ReelNative” initiative “gives voice to contemporary issues of Native American people across the country.”

“Ranging in age from 14 to 55, the ReelNative filmmakers generously share their stories of self-discovery, personal or professional growth, familial relationships, and tribal issues. Quirky, touching, funny, and profound, these films reveal the diversity of contemporary Native experience and the resilience of Native people and culture.”

Participants in Thursday’s screening include filmmakers Bruce and Keely Curliss (Nipmuc) from Cambridge. The 14-year-old Keely made a film about wanting to reclaim Wachussett Mountain for her tribe. The film led to an invitation for the teenager to speak at Harvard University.

This Friday through Sunday, New Englanders have an opportunity to descend upon one of the wittiest named film festivals in the world. Hosted by the gorgeous, independent Red River Theatres in downtown Concord, NH, the Somewhat North of Boston, or SNOB Film Festival is a gem.

If you dress in all black 24/7 and wear a goatee, perhaps you won’t appreciate the irony. But SNOB mockingly refers to both the pretentiousness in the indie film world and the pretentiousness amongst the Boston elite who consider New Hampshire people to be heathens.

Wow. “Boston elite.” I sounded like Sarah Palin for a moment. Actually, it’s the Massachusetts elite. Way too many people in the Bay State who think of Concord as Ottawa or Siberia.

Expect t-shirt sales to go through the roof.

And oh yeah, the SNOB Film Festival also plays movies. Movies you likely won’t have a chance to see at your local cine-megaplex. Some highlights:

* The Castle (ME/51 min/2007/ Neil Norello) By using a U.S. Navy-produced film, interviews with former Marine and Navy personnel, as well as the wife of the last Marine commander, this film tells the story of the Navy’s only maximum-security prison, ever, the Portsmouth Naval Prison.

* Dean and Me: Roadshow of an American Primary (VT/88 min/2008/ Heith Eiden) Connect to a revolutionary, grassroots effort that changed politics and jump-started a national debate at a time when American democracy was, and remains, fragile. This film’s ultimate discovery is that the real story about Howard Dean and the movement he inspired took place well outside the closed theater of American media politics.

* The Faking of the President (NY/80 min/1976/Alan Abel) This rarely screened faux documentary features scenes starring famed Nixon-imitator Jim M. Dixon inter-cut with archival news footage. The audio track was created via splicing together snippets of the ex-President’s actual voice. Sifted from hundreds of hours of interviews, the Abel’s manipulated and re-edited Nixon’s words, syllable-by-syllable, to make him utter outrageous things. In this pastiche, the audience is treated to a full confession from a tearful Nixon and many more interesting vignettes.

* Play-By-Play Men and the Art of the Perfect Call (MA/ 76min/ 2007/Ziad Hamzeh) Sit beside Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ernie Harwell, voice of the Detroit Tigers and six-time winner of Sportscaster of the Year; Chicago Cubs’ Pat Hughes, two-time winner of Washington’s Sportscaster of the Year; Seattle Mariners’ Hall of Famer Dave Neihaus; former MLB player, Detroit Tigers’ announcer Jim Price, the Baltimore Orioles’ Joe Angel, and the Red Sox play-by-play-man of twenty-five years, Joe Castiglione, for an insider’s look at the inside craft of play-by-play.

* Wiener Takes All: A Dogumentary (Canada/89 min/2007/Shane MacDougall) Take a journey into the unexplored world of competitive wiener dogs, home to capacity crowds, healthy dachshunds, and rabid owners. “Wiener” unleashes the truth as it tracks America’s fastest weenies on a tour of the national dachshund racing circuit. Crisscrossing the continent, we get the inside scoop on what makes these champion dogs and their colorful owners tick.

* The Wizard Rockumentary: A Movie About Rocking and Rowling (USA/92 min/2008/Mallory and Megan Schuyler) Enter a world where music is magic, love is power, and reading is cool, the world of wizard rock. This movie documents the wrock community through the year looking up to the final Harry Potter book release, their rise from less than 30 bands to 450, and their journey from obscurity to international media coverage.
The full 2008 SNOB Film Festival Line-up and Schedule is here!

Full disclosure: I have a movie in this film festival, but as you noticed, I have not plugged it here. But if you are the dogged, inquisitive type, by all means Google “Garnick” and “Snob” and see what you come up with besides some of my relatives.

If you are anywhere near I-95 today, scoot up to Portsmouth for brunch and perhaps the best kept cultural secret in New England — the New Hampshire Film Festival.

The entire downtown is pulsating with the indie spirit this weekend, and who knows which future talents might be sitting at the table next to you at killer bakeries like Popovers on the Square.

From 3:30 to 4:30 p.m., I’m privileged to be moderating the NH Artists in Residence panel featuring Emmy-award winning documentarians Julia Reichart and Steven Bognar. The filmmaking team spent six years following the lives of five families in the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital pediatric cancer ward.

In their groundbreaking film, “A Lion in the House,” the couple gives you a gut-wrenching immersion into these children’s lives, their roller coaster hopes for survival, their heartbreaking social isolation from friends and sometimes family, and more often than not, their funerals.

Reichart and Bognar had first lived the experience themselves with their own daughter — and in a cruel twist of irony, Reichart found out she had cancer moments after she arrived to screen this movie at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

Need any more incentive to organize your home videos into something watchable to pass on to future generations (within the family?)

Check out this Thursday night’s Found Footage Festival at the Coolidge Theater in Brookline.

If you’re not careful, your life could be mocked in front of strangers on the big screen.

The Found Footage Festival uses clips from home movies and corporate films salvaged from yard sales, Goodwill and other unlikely peddlers of private memories. Curators Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher go the extra mile and track down the real people in the videos and occasionally book them for live appearances.

Here’s their official MySpace bio:

“Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher began collecting found videotapes in 1991 after stumbling across a training video entitled, “Inside and Outside Custodial Duties” in a McDonald’s break room. Since then, they have compiled an impressive collection of strange, outrageous and profoundly stupid videos. Pickett and Prueher, whose credits include The Onion and the Late Show with David Letterman, recently directed the feature-length documentary, Dirty Country, which won the 24 Beats Per Second Audience Award at the 2007 South By Southwest Film Festival.”

The evening combines live comedy with obscure footage, promising “Stuff You’ll See Nowhere Else.” Their trailer is absolutely hilarious:

Found Footage Festival 2008 Trailer

The 7th Annual Boston Latino International Film Festival kicks off this weekend, focused on themes of “identity, immigration, and industry.” The six-day fest features 60 films from 17 countries at the following venues:

* Harvard Film Archive (24 Quincy Street, Cambridge) from October 3-5;
* Boston University — free screenings October 8, 9 & 12;
* Border Street Cultural Exchange Center (80 Border Street, East Boston) from October 10-11

Festival highlights include:

Maldeamores (pictured above) — a Puerto Rico set film starring Luis Guzmán (Magnolia, Boogie Nights) and Luis Gonzaga (Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights) that weaves together three ironic tales of maddening infatuation: a divorced elderly couple in a love triangle, a young boy coming of age, and a hostage situation.

Used Parts — A teenager lives with his uncle, a dealer of used car parts, in Mexico. When the uncle realizes he needs more money to pay the “Coyote” who will help them cross the border, he introduces his nephew to the world of car-part theft. With the help of his best friend, he becomes skillful at his new trade until everything is called into question by his uncle’s shifting intentions.

Panel Discussion: Self Distribution, Technology and Film — With evolving technologies such as the Internet and DVDs, emerging filmmakers must constantly update their toolboxes and consider such options as self-distribution. This conversation will explore the changing landscape of the film industry.

The Women of Brukman — During the 2001 economic collapse in Argentina, the seamstresses at Brukman’s clothing factory took over when the owners abandoned the operation. The film follows these courageous women over many years.

Quarta B — A group of parents and school officials discuss the discovery of drugs in a fourth grade classroom. Accusations and revelations fly, especially after one parent proposes they all smoke a joint.

Eréndira the Indomitable — Eréndira, a young Purépecha woman living in what is now Mexico, became an icon of bravery during the Conquest of the 16th century.

Cubanos: Life and Death of a Revolution — A colorful documentary portrait of the Cuban community featuring sincere interviews and stunning sequence shots. Catuey, a Cuban musician, takes the viewer on a journey through his homeland as the film explores a complex history and a fragmented national identity. Director Yan Giroux will be present for Q&A

Individual tickets are $8, $6 for students and seniors, and can be purchased at the Harvard Film Archive box office on the day of the show. Festival passes are $70, which includes admission to all festival films and parties. Party admission is $10.

For more information and a complete film schedule, visit www.bliff.org

Emerson College filmmaker Nicole Prowell, who chronicled her cross-country search for happiness earlier this year for the New England Film Junkie, has emerged alive from the edit room!

Check out tonight’s free screening of her “Happy Hunting” documentary short, along with some intriguing films made by her classmates:

Master’s Project Screening
Friday, September 26th
7:00pm
Billy Bordy Auditorium
216 Tremont Street
Free

Here’s the scheduled line-up:

Happy Hunting by Nicole Prowell (running time: 15 minutes)
A short, personal documentary about a quarter-life crisis journey
across the US to find a true definition of happiness. Director Nicole
Prowell travelled from Boston-Seattle and Portland, Oregon back in May
and interviewed a variety of people she encountered along the way,
while discovering that sometimes happiness is best left undefined.

Nuclear Climate Change by Summers Henderson (running time: 55 minutes)
A documentary examining the debate over nuclear power in a time when
the need for alternative energy sources is more urgent than ever.
While some see nuclear power as part of a solution to global climate
change, there are persistent questions about its safety, security and
affordability. Anti-nuclear activists in Massachusetts and New
Hampshire and students and faculty from MIT address this complex,
pressing issue.

Drawn by Adam Shonkoff (running time: 20 minutes)
A comedy about a twenty-something who meets the girl of his dreams in a
psychology experiment where they aren’t allowed to speak to each
other. After the experiment he is determined to find her.

Franchising “Friday Night Lights”:The Challenge of Transmedia
Storytelling for Realist Drama by Jonelle Lonergan (running time: 10
minutes)
A multimedia media studies thesis that explores the concept of
transmedia storytelling and, using NBC’s Friday Night Lights as a case
study, proposes a model for applying the concept to realist television
texts. http://www.jonellelonergan.com/thesis/

While McCain and Obama debate how to move troops between Iraq and Afghanistan like chess pieces, keeping focused on how we care for soldiers once they come back home becomes all the more vital.

Here’s another chance to catch “Hidden Wounds,” the New England Cable News documentary about local soldiers coping with post-traumatic stress disorder.  The film, written and produced by NECN executive editor Iris Adler, screens at 3 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 28, at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Adler says the movie continues to make an impact long after its 2006 broadcast, screening at college campuses, mental health facilities and for veterans’ organizations. Here’s the film synopsis from the distributor, Boston-based Fanlight Productions:

The psychological wounds suffered by veterans returning from war may be as hard to overcome and as difficult to cope with as the physical injuries of combat. Veterans may experience severe anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicidal feelings. It’s estimated that one in five of the troops returning from the current war in Iraq will suffer some form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD.) Their symptoms may include intrusive memories and dreams, flashbacks, hypervigilance, impaired memory, diminished affect, and feelings of estrangement from others that interfere with their return to civilian work and family.

A powerful documentary, Hidden Wounds, explores this painful reality through the stories of three veterans and their struggles to overcome the trauma of their experiences. Nate Fick, a Dartmouth College graduate, was a platoon commander in the elite Marine “Recon” unit. He fought in Afghanistan, and then Iraq, but on his return to the United States, he became seriously depressed for close to a year. In dealing with his feelings he turned to writing, resulting in the book, One Bullet Away.

Sgt. Russell Anderson served in the Army for four years after graduating from high school in the late sixties. However, he remained in the Army Reserve, and in 2004 he volunteered to go to Iraq. Hostile and depressed after his return, he refused to seek counseling, considering it a sign of weakness.

Jeff Lucey joined the Marine Reserves as a high school senior, then spent a year as a truck driver in Iraq. Returning home, he began drinking heavily, experienced panic attacks, and became increasingly despondent. Despite his parents’ pleas, the Veterans Administration would not agree to commit him for treatment of his post-traumatic stress disorder until he stopped drinking. He committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. His parents have become activists in the campaign to ensure adequate government funding for PTSD treatment.

Anderson is from Norton, Mass. Lucey was from Belchertown, Mass.

“Hidden Wounds” is the closing film at this year’s United Nations Association Traveling Film Festival Boston, which highlights human rights films around the world. Filmmaker Iris Adler will lead a group discussion following the screening.