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 Current, a new report commissioned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) calls for an overhaul of its relationship with the National Minority Consortia.
The major hurdle identified by Coats2Coats [Consultancy] is the impaired relationship between the corporation and the consortia, which "is built largely on issues of contract enforcement and compliance, leaving insufficient room for dialogue about mission and goals…There is a hunger within the NMC for more substantive dialogue with CPB, for shared goal setting and for discussion about what is working, where there are opportunities, which risks are justified," according to the report. "This conversation has to be intentional, because it will not happen organically based on the current reporting relationship," which mainly focuses on financial accountability.
In the wake of the Vaxxed/Tribeca imbroglio, The New York Times' Melena Ryzik talks to festival programmers about the pressure of scrutinizing and vetting what they screen.
As documentarians multiply, pointing their cameras at ever more esoteric, provocative and sometimes contentious stories, there is increasing pressure on programmers to act not just as quality control but also perhaps as judges of fairness and accuracy. Especially since the films themselves are more picked apart.
From Elle, filmmaker Tracie Droz Tragos discusses her latest doc, Abortion: Stories Women Tell, which premieres at Tribeca this month.
"When we first started off, we knew that we wanted to tell an intimate, personal story. We wanted to look at abortion through a different lens perhaps than had been [looked at] before. There was already a lot of coverage on the politics and the rhetoric, especially because this is an election year. But what I was really interested in hearing and elevating were the voices of real women."
London-based writer/producer Stephen Follows examines the evolution and challenges of the film festival submission process.
"An essential part of running a film festival is being able to attract new films to screen each year. The more prestigious your festival is, the more filmmakers will submit their film. In my 2013 study, I found that around two thirds of festivals charge filmmakers a submission fee when they send their film in to be considered. These fees offset the cost of reviewing films, and for many festivals are an essential part of their economic survival. As you may expect, almost all submissions are currently made online, and it's here that our dramatic tale takes place."
From the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger, professors at Johannes Gutenberg – Universität Mainz, Mainz, Germany, address ethical concerns in VR production and use and offer a code of best practices.
VR is a technology, and technologies change the objective world. Objective changes are subjectively perceived, and may lead to correlated shifts in value judgments. VR technology will eventually change not only our general image of humanity but also our understanding of deeply entrenched notions, such as "conscious experience," "selfhood," "authenticity," or "realness." In addition, it will transform the structure of our life-world, bringing about entirely novel forms of everyday social interactions and changing the very relationship we have to our own minds. In short, there will be a complex and dynamic interaction between "normality" (in the descriptive sense) and "normalization" (in the normative sense), and it is hard to predict where the overall process will lead us.
From Medium.com, filmmakers/experience designers Katy Newton and Karin Soukup offer a storyteller's guide to the virtual reality audience.
Being bodily present in the story seeds the need to be active, to "do." But how does the audience know what to do? And how do we take their needs and perspective into consideration? To even scratch the surface of these questions, we need to better understand the audience's experience in VR — not just their experience of the technology, but the way that they understand story and their role within it.
As anybody shouting "bubble!" will tell you, many publications are currently dabbling in podcasts; some successfully, others less so. A big part of the strategy for networks like Panoply and DGital Media involves them serving as intermediaries for publishers, shouldering significant chunks of the creative, production, strategic, and monetization burden for partners. And for many of these arrangements, it's not exactly "plug and play," but it's fairly close.
The impact of documentaries about the politics of difference in America on public television can be strongly attributed to a network of media organizations known as the National Minority Consortia. The Minority Consortia assist in the funding of independent films and act as a pipeline for multicultural content to PBS. Cutting-edge documentaries such as Señorita Extraviada (2002), Great American Footrace (2002), Kelly Loves Tony (1998), Black is...Black Ain't (1996) and Storytellers of the Pacific (1996) have all been funded in part by the Minority Consortia, in cooperation with the Independent Television Service (ITVS).
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