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 New York Times, James Glanz reports from the West Bank on the world behind the documentary The Settlers.
Mr. Dotan’s film chronicles the germination of the early settler movement after Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, including the ideas and religious zeal that fueled it, and explores its latest extreme element: the hilltop youth. They are but a tiny fraction of the more than 400,000 Israeli Jews living in the occupied West Bank, but the object of mounting concern as they are blamed for extreme violence there, like the arson last summer that killed a toddler and his parents in the village of Duma.
As part of an ongoing symposium on nonfiction and "cinematic reality" at Reverse Shot, Daniel Witkin compares two innovative films that consider the effects of large-scale construction.
In Nostalgia for the Light, these are the giant telescopes that inhabit Chile’s Atacama Desert, a region whose tremendously inhospitable environs make its skies ideal for stargazing, and whose seclusion led to its being the site of Pinochet-era concentration camps for “the disappeared”: dissidents and innocents alike who were taken by the regime and never heard from again. Still Life is dominated by the Three Gorges Dam, whose titanic import looms over its characters even as they look down upon it from the hills above. In both films, the sight of these machines is equally exhilarating and unnerving; like something out of science fiction, they invoke the magnificence of human potential while bluntly dwarfing their creators.
In Cosmopolitan, Prachi Gupta reports on Across the Line, a VR experience that puts viewers in the shoes of a young woman visiting a Planned Parenthood clinic.
Despite an increasingly hostile climate for reproductive rights, activists are hopeful there are ways to engage people in thoughtful debate. A recent poll by PerryUndem Research and Vox found that 55 percent of voters are uninformed about the growing number of laws that make it harder for women to access reproductive heath care, and 75 percent of voters believe that abortion should be a positive experience. In other words, most people in America are unaware of the challenges women face to access an abortion. By authentically portraying the maddeningly ordinary harassment women deal with, the film's creators hope to cut through some of the polarized political debate and appeal to people on an emotional level. It's about as authentic an experience as you can get outside of visiting a Planned Parenthood clinic yourself.
At Filmmaker, Paula Bernstein reports on a workshop about developing a documentary distribution strategy.
Gone are the days when if you were lucky enough to sell your documentary to a single distributor, they would take care of the rest. Though a select group of established documentary filmmakers still operate along those traditional lines, the majority of independent filmmakers working in documentaries today rely on a hybrid distribution plan in which theatrical, festivals, broadcast, educational, non-theatrical, and VOD rights are split.
P.O.V. continues its series on the process and craft of documentary editors by interviewing Kim Roberts.
"I think the three act structure does still apply, or as much as it applies to any doc. Many films I work on are more four acts, or sometimes more. The important thing is for a film to build, and not feel like it’s treading water. In social issue docs, it’s also very important to keep the film surprising, and have variance in tone. You have to build in lighter moments and humor. The darker material is usually more 'third act' material, but not always."
"I learned more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on this five-day trip than I had learned in the last five years. Each car ride with our US Embassy hosts was an opportunity to ask lots of questions, like why Arab-Israelis are not part of the Israeli Defense Force, what areas fall within the Green Line, how everything changed after 1967...and why Israeli coffee is so tasty. My brain was firing at high speed with all of this new information (and the coffee). But after each screening—and each discussion, conversation and meal—Israel seemed simpler."
John Belushi Documentary in the Works at Showtime
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IMAX Makes Major VR Moves
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National Film Board of Canada Commits 50% of Production Budget to Films by Women
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