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 Center For Media & Social Impact, Caty Borum Chattoo reveals the results of a 2016 survey of documentary industry members.
Despite new opportunities for documentary filmmakers and audiences, particular challenges are persistent. Questions about sustainable systems and sources of revenue that can support career-making documentary work continue to plague makers of all kinds. Issues of racial, gender and ethnic diversity – both in terms of the credited makers themselves, as well as the focus of the stories told – continue to challenge the business and art of documentary filmmaking, dispelling the myth that the system of independent documentary filmmaking is markedly distinct from similar circumstances facing scripted Hollywood entertainment in film and on TV. As new audiences continue to discover documentary storytelling across various platforms, tracking industry professionals’ perspectives and lived experiences in the field is a vital pursuit.
At Realscreen, Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck discusses doc financing and his new film about James Baldwin.
"If I can boil it down to one word, it's power. As long as you don't have a black person, a woman, an Asian person or a Latino person who can greenlight a film without having to ask to anyone else, nothing will really change. If you cannot change the power structure, we will have this conversation on and on for the next 60 years."
At Slate, Sam Adams argues that "Peak TV" is responsible for the strange brilliance of IFC's Documentary Now.
As an ever-increasing number of networks and streaming providers try to claim their place at the scripted-content table, Peak TV's embarrassment of riches can tip into straight-up embarrassment. (Any minute now we'll get word of an edgy antihero drama being developed for Nick Jr.) But it's also allowed some exceptionally strange and rare flowers to bloom, shows whose very existence, to say nothing of their success, would have been unimaginable even a few years ago.
The Hollywood Reporter reports on Netflix's Ted Sarandos' response to claims of curtailed creative freedom.
"Our job is to pick the right shows, pick the right storytellers and create an environment where they can do the best work of their life.... Our creative involvement in the shows is collaborative and always invited," Sarandos said, sharing what he has impressed on his team: "If you are not collaborating with the show by the time it's in production, then we have failed in some way, if we haven't been invited into the process. But we don't impose ourselves on the process creatively."
At The Intercept, Naomi LaChance reports that an Arkansas lawmaker who helped pass a state law protecting people who film police was himself arrested while filming Little Rock police.
Arrests for filming are actually becoming less common, said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU. "The long time that it took police officers to recognize this right was in many ways an indictment of police management. It also shows that photography is a form of power," he told the Intercept.
"The level of "ridiculous authenticity" behind the show's execution goes as far as hunting down the original camera lenses used by Robert Flaherty in the 1920s for one episode, while exquisitely mimicking the Maysles brothers' 1970s editing rhythm and 16mm aesthetic in another. While doc buffs everywhere might be completely tuned in to the entire breadth of each episode's broader joke, we were interested in whether these parodies would jibe with a wider audience. We reached out to series co-director Rhys Thomas to discuss audience comprehension, and what to expect from arguably one of the most niche series on television today."
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