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!
Filmmaker Marshall Curry blogs in the Huffington Post about Anthony Weiner, subject of Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s Weiner, Cory Booker, subject of Curry’s Street Fight, and the challenges of finding the real person behind the candidate.
One of the most challenging things about making any documentary is getting people to relax around a camera and share their true inner selves. This challenge is even greater when the subject of the film is a professional politician whose livelihood depends on being perceived as impossibly, unnaturally flawless.
Also in Huffington Post, filmmaker Ken Burns shares his commencement address that he delivered to the graduating class at Stanford University.
Over those decades of historical documentary filmmaking, I have also come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. History is a mysterious and malleable thing, constantly changing, not just as new information emerges, but as our own interests, emotions and inclinations change. Each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of its past that gives its present new meaning, new possibility and new power. The question becomes for us now—for you especially—what will we choose as our inspiration? Which distant events and long dead figures will provide us with the greatest help, the most coherent context, and the wisdom to go forward?
Realscreen’s Manori Ravindran takes you inside Sheffield Doc/Fest’s Alternate Realities Summit.
“What I’ve been doing is proving my title wrong because the filmmaking part isn’t the point of VR,” says Jessica Brillhart, principal filmmaker for VR at Google. “We go into an experience and we want to express it to someone else. We think, ‘Okay, I had this experience,’ and show photo and video and craft this nugget of a thing and that person engages with that. That’s the medium and that nugget is story. In VR, most of that goes away. Medium and story don’t have strongholds as they did before.”
Observer.com’s Vida Weisblum travels to Camden, Maine, where Camden International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Institute and CNN are hosting a weeklong retreat for docmakers.
A new retreat program in Camden, Maine hosted by the Tribeca Film Institute and Camden International Film Festival, and sponsored by CNN Films is lending support and guidance to budding film artists—like the Ali brothers, whose projects, perspectives and stories harbor potential to effect powerful and positive change; the retreat, now in its second year, is aimed at American documentarians from diverse backgrounds who might not otherwise have the resources or opportunities to see their work flourish.
Sight & Sound’s Neil Young reports on the rise of female documentary makers in Mexico.
Mexico may not be the easiest country in which to be a woman, and its cinema’s pecking order is as macho as most. But at this year’s Ambulante touring documentary festival, half a dozen strong female-directed finds show the country’s subordinate sex finding its voice.
Joe Nocero of The New York Times Magazine goes long and deep about Netflix and its future in the world it created.
Asked what the competitive landscape would look like five years in the future, [Netflix CEO Reed Hastings] returned to the analogy he used earlier with the evolution of the telephone. Landlines had been losing out to mobile phones for the past 15 years, he said, but it had been a gradual process. The same, he believed, would be true of television. “There won’t be a dramatic tipping point,” he said. “What you will see is that the bundle gets used less and less.” For now, even as Hulu and Amazon were emerging as rivals, he claimed that the true competition was still for users’ time: not just the time they spent watching cable but the time they spent reading books, attending concerts. And Hastings was aware that even after the bundle is vanquished, the disruption of his industry will be far from complete. “Prospective threats?” he mused when I asked him about all the competition. “Movies and television could become like opera and novels, because there are so many other forms of entertainment. Someday, movies and TV shows will be historic relics. But that might not be for another 100 years.”
From the archives, Winter 2010, “Transcending Borders: Natalia Almada"
“Edward Said begins his biography with a quote about language that I think really describes the experience of growing up in a bicultural family and always living between two cultures. He writes, ‘I have never known what language I spoke first...or which one was really mine beyond any doubt. What I do know is that the two have always been together in my life, one resonating in the other, sometimes ironically, sometimes nostalgically, most often each correcting and commenting on, the other.’ I don't think that my being bicultural triggers my interests in these issues as much as it shapes the way that I see things. I am interested in making the dualities and contradictions that Said describes in language, intrinsic to my films.”
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