A group made primarily of VFSers (team name: What Cannes You Do In One Day) has won all-expenses-paid trips to Cannes 2008!

This year’s Cannes Film Festival hosted two documentary contests: one for student filmmakers attending a filmmaking program at Cannes these past couple of weeks. The other, for teams of documentary filmmakers around the world, who submitted their made-in-one-week-or-less docs to the Reel Ideas Studio site.

The short docs were then judged by Christopher Coppola of Plaster City, Dan Birman, professor of Journalism at University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, and two-time Oscar-winning documentary producer Robert Epstein. The team made up of Film grad Aaron Beckum, instructors Megan Bodaly and Glen Tedham, and Glen’s wife Jeannie Tedham, turned in a funny and touching documentary, Documenting Charity (and the Art of Street Shaving), which screened at Cannes yesterday to cheering – and, we’re guessing, a few tears. Watch it for yourself:

The best part of all this is how inspiring the doc itself is. Driven by the idea of “what can be done in one day”, the filmmakers decided to see how much money they could raise – even offering to shave various tender body parts – for ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease). In a single day, these guys raised $530.62. VFS is matching the donation.

Judges singled the film out for using the documentary form to not only educate, but to effect positive change in the world as well.

Giving something back and going to Cannes for free… doesn’t get much better than that!

Also stay tuned for an update on the VFS grads – and bloggers – in Cannes, Dave Roncin and Robin Kupferman, and the docs they made (currently viewable on Reel Ideas Studio, team names: L’arc and Crea8iv).