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!
At The Washington Post, Ann Hornaday reports on the shifting nature of the contract between documentary filmmakers, their sources, and their viewers.
Participants’ remorse is surely nothing new in documentaries, wherein directors routinely take the raw material of talking-head interviews and trim, shape and manipulate it to their own ends, whether it’s to elicit an emotional reaction, score political points or simply create an entertaining narrative. But in an age when fact-based entertainment is ascendant, and when sources can push back easily and ubiquitously on social media, the contract between filmmaker and source is more crucial — and more subject to ex post facto argument — than ever.
Boris Kachka of Vulture visits Alex Gibney's Jigsaw Productions to explore the way the filmmaker's fearsome pace is reinventing doc filmmaking.
Gibney’s churn may be relentless — investigative features, PBS specials, ESPN shorts, Netflix food porn, HBO music bios, a CNN docuseries, a New Yorker video supplement for Amazon — but it’s probably best not to use that analogy in his presence. "Factory isn’t a fair way of describing it," says Marc Shmuger, the former Universal Pictures chairman who produced We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks as well as Zero Days, a terrifying new exposé of cyberwarfare that opens in July. "I would call it a studio — a vision of what original studios were doing when they started telling narrative stories."
For Variety, Leo Barraclough outlines seven likely consequences of Brexit for the British film and TV industry.
First is the likely end of financial backing from the Media Program, the E.U.’s funding body for the film, TV and digital media sectors. This will hit funding for film in particular, including training, project development, co-production, festivals and the theatrical distribution of E.U. films in Britain and the theatrical distribution of British films in Europe.
Whicker's World Foundation releases the findings of its 2016 survey on the current cost of making a documentary.
In January 2016 the Whicker's World Foundation set out to find what its top funding award of €80,000 could buy in the documentary filmmaking industry. After realising that this information wasn't readily available, we decided to conduct our own survey with the help of partners Sheffield Doc/Fest and the European Documentary Network. By compiling the responses of 191 documentary makers to 16 questions, we aim to construct a picture of the documentary filmmaking field in 2016. We hope that our statistics will prove useful in discussions about the state of documentary-making and the challenges facing filmmakers today.
At Filmmaker, Paula Bernstein looks at recent documentaries that use animation to tell compelling nonfiction stories.
It’s a technique audiences have grown accustomed to and nonfiction filmmakers have learned to adopt with varying degrees of success. While in the past, documentary purists might have posited that animation had no place in non-fiction storytelling, it’s now largely accepted that even observational documentaries involve some degree of manipulation. If anything, by using animation in a documentary, the manipulation is more explicit.
The men Gibney interviewed understood why they were charged with crimes, but they didn’t understand why their superiors weren’t even investigated. “But I’m not sure it was just a matter of obedience, which was the subject [Stanley] Milgram was interested in,” he says. “The Bush administration played a more dangerous game. They encouraged soldiers to ‘embrace the dark side.’ That was like letting loose a virulent virus of cruelty that mutated and migrated as it spread from Bagram to Abu Ghraib, from the Pentagon to Guantanamo and into the black sites around the world that we still don’t really know about.”
Introducing the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Class of 2016
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Academy OKs New Rules on Oscar Qualifying Runs, Campaigning
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Hot Docs and Rogers Foundation Launch New $1-Million Production Fund for Canadian Docs
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POV and The New York Times Collaborate to Explore the Future of Documentary With a New Interactive Project About Race
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Kartemquin Celebrates 50th Anniversary With Film Fund
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