Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy!
From the Full Frame Documentary Festival website, filmmaker R.J. Cutler shares with director of programming Sadie Tillery his vision behind the program that he curated for the festival, "Perfect and Otherwise: Documenting American Politics."
"Looking at the films together reveals all sorts of fascinating through lines in American politics over the last 60-plus years… The most resonant common theme is that as so many things change and evolve, the very defining fundamentals of the process remain the same. So it becomes deeply interesting, for instance, to examine the role of the campaign strategist as it grows and alters (and doesn’t) throughout the series, and particularly so as we see James Carville emerge as a strategist celebrity in The War Room, only to have his role, his profession, and the company he created post-War Room, thoroughly deconstructed in Our Brand Is Crisis. Similarly, the role of the media in these films evolves (as does the size of the screens on which campaigns are delivered to the citizenry), and you can see that role being confronted in a striking way over time with the whole series being viewable through the prism of Medium Cool or A Perfect Candidate, each of which features a journalist as its main character."
Kevin Ritchie of RealScreen scopes out the funding landscape for artful nonfiction.
"Documentary is such a young art form...There's still a lot of exploration in how we can tell the stories of our times but we're never going to get there if the focus is always on the end product. In great cinema, the notion of how we say things is more important than what we're saying. We don't often build that into our creative infrastructure." -- Tabitha Jackson, Director, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program
Writing for The Establishment, Chelsea Jack talks to filmmakers and scholars about ethics in the wake of the Vaxxed/Tribeca affair.
But the decision to accept, and then kill, the documentary raises important questions that shouldn’t be put to rest just because the film has been. The episode invites us to consider how directors can and should choose to represent a point of view, and challenges us to reevaluate preconceptions (and misconceptions) about what the word "documentary" means as a form of nonfiction storytelling.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real showcase continues through the weekend, and one of the highlights is Brett Story’s Prison in Twelve Landscapes, which is featured in Filmmaker.
"Then, on the other hand, we're flooded by all sorts of imagery of prisons in mass media — on our screens, in cinema and in television. And it seems to me that in these images there's the reproduction of the same thing over and over again — perhaps especially in progressive, liberal media production and non-fiction cinema. Liberal prison documentaries are almost always documentaries in which you go inside a prison and some sort of injustice is exposed. The injustice might be that someone is wrongfully committed, or the injustice might be that the person is being punished too harshly for what their crime was, or that prisons are wild spaces of all sorts of violence. The political impact of these films is then tethered to the sympathy that they might or might not generate from an audience. And I've just been thinking a lot about what that does and what that doesn't do, especially as far as enabling a different way of both seeing and thinking about prisons."
Field of Vision launched its Spring Season last month, and founder AJ Schnack’s film Speaking Is Difficult takes a singular view on the rash of mass shootings in America. Schnack shares his insights about the making of the film with The New York Times.
The goal is to "at least remind people that this is not normal…And it's not enough just to be horrified or concerned about it. You have to actually engage…The title Speaking Is Difficult is kind of a double meaning. It references the speech at the end of the film, but it also is about the fact that our ability to have a national conversation has been not only difficult, but almost impossible."
From Need Supply Co. blog, an interview with the braintrust behind LA-based Women of Cinefamily, which includes Cinefamily’s Director of Programming—and former Communications Manager at IDA—KJ Relth.
"We aim to broaden the playing field in the exhibition world as well. Women need to have just as much of a hand in the programming of the films that go before an audience to ensure representation across the board. Basically, we're demanding a seat at the table."
For filmmakers trying to wrangle a narrative structure out of the messiness of real life, campaigns are made to order. Usually, two candidates face off in a race that has a beginning, a middle and a dramatic end. Someone wins and someone loses on election night (unless, of course, it's Florida 2000). That said, films are also subject to the rules of successful cinema. Are the characters compelling on film? Do you have real access to them? Given that this is about politics, where careers are made of spin and constructed personal narratives are the rule, are your characters introspective enough, real enough, to care about? Or are the surrounding forces-the campaign, the issues, the political movements, even the people around the candidates-the real focus of the film? The best campaign documentaries answer the call on those questions.
Guggenheim Foundation Names 2016 Fellows
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The Peabody Awards Board of Jurors Reveals 60 Finalists
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A Massive List of Spring 2016 Grants All Filmmakers Should Know About
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Skoll, Ford, and BRITDOC Launch Flex Fund to Expand Impact of Storytelling
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Helvetica Filmmaker Launches VR Firm
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Netflix Premieres First Original Short Documentary, Extremis, in September
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