Edit Room Chronicles: Behind the Director/Editor Collaboration

Dark blue background with multicolor circles. Headshots of (L to R, Top to Bottom) Tadashi Nakamura, Yaël Bitton, Natalia Koniarz, Victoria Chalk. Edit Room Chronicles: Behind the Director/Editor Collaboration. January 28, 2026, 10 am PT

Though many understand editing mechanics, fewer witness the intimate creative space where nonfiction films truly take shape. Some directors and editors work in tandem, while others drop in and out of projects. While commercial gigs might be compressed into mere weeks, filmmakers frequently edit creative feature documentaries for far longer than six months, with harried last editing pushes before festival or broadcast deadlines. In these pressure cooker environments, how do directors and editors resolve creative differences? What questions do they ask before committing to work together? Are there any workflow strategies that help sustain momentum over months—sometimes years—in the edit suite?

In this session, two critically acclaimed filmmaking teams will share the granular details of their working relationship, walking through scenes from meaningful recent films. Their presentations will be followed by an audience Q&A. Join us for an honest look inside one of documentary’s most crucial and private creative spaces.

The event is available for 300 people. RSVP today!

Attendees and Participation

This event is open to the public for registration. Recording of the event is not guaranteed.

*If a recording is available, it will be available for the public for one month after the event. After that, the recording will be in the IDA Member portal only

Access:

If you have any access needs that you would like to share with us, please email access@documentary.org at least two weeks prior to the event. We will do our best to accommodate. Automatic Zoom captions will be turned on

Code of Conduct

All participants agree to read and approve the IDA Events Code of Conduct here.

Event Participants

Tadashi Nakamura

Tadashi Nakamura is an Emmy-award-winning filmmaker and the Director of the Watase Media Arts Center, a production company of the Japanese American National Museum. Tadashi was named CNN’s “Young People Who Rock” for being the youngest filmmaker at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. In 2025, he returned to Sundance to premiere his latest film, Third Act (2025), about his pioneering filmmaker father, Robert A. Nakamura. With over 20 years of filmmaking experience, his films include Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song In Movement (2024), Benkyodo: The Last Manju Shop In J-Town (2023), Atomic Cafe: The Nosiest Corner In J-Town (2020), Mele Murals (2016), Jake Shimabukuro: Life On Four Strings (2013), A Song For Ourselves (2009), and Pilgrimage (2006).

Victoria Chalk

Victoria Chalk, ACE, is a European-Asian film editor with 20 years of post-production experience. Her recent work includes two episodes of the Peabody-winning PBS documentary series “Asian Americans” and “Third Act” by Tadashi Nakamura, which premiered in competition at Sundance 2025. Victoria is a DOCNY 2020 40 under 40 honoree, the 2019 Karen Schmeer Editing Fellow, and runs Across The Cut, an intersectional edit roster, along with three fellow editors.

Yaël Bitton

Yaël Bitton is an award-winning documentary film editor, writer, story consultant, and director with over 30 years of experience. She has won the SIMA Editing Award for Radio Silence (2020), Best Editing at the Israel Documentary Forum for Advocate (2019), and the Adobe DokFest Editing Award for KIX (2024). She has been editing mostly non-fiction films with directors from around the world, shaping complex and unique stories and forms, particularly loving to work with music and sound. Over the last years she has worked with: Natalia Koniarz, whose recent Silver (2025) won 6 awards at Krakow Film Festival; Callisto Mc Nulty on La Muraille (2024), which premiered at VDR 2025; with Karima Saïdi Ceux qui veillent by Karima Saïdi (2025), which premiered at IDFA 2025 ; and also with: Petra Costa, whose latest film, Apocalypse in the Tropics, opened at the Venice Film Festival (2024) and is shortlisted for the Oscars; Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivisan on Nocturnes (2024), which won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft at Sundance; Balint Revesz and David Mikulan on KIX (2024), which won best film at Camden Film Festival 2024, and over 20 awards that year; Rahul Jain, whose latest film Invisible Demons (2021) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival that year, and whose first film Machines (2015) won numerous prizes worldwide, including Sundance in 2017; Felipe Monroy, including the powerful Las fantasmas del Carribe (2023) and Hijos del Viento (2021); Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche on Advocate (2019) which won, among numerous awards, the Emmy award for Best documentary, the Asia Pacific Screen awards for best documentary feature; Juliana Fanjul on Radio Silence (2019) and Muchachas (2014), among many others.

Yaël is a mentor, consultant, and educator, working with programs such as Docs Nomads, Zelig Documentary film school, DOK Incubator, Visions du Réel, and Ex Oriente. She taught editing at HEAD/Cinéma du Réel in Geneva from 2008 to 2023. During the Spring semester of 2024, she was invited as a fellow teacher at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York. She is a member of the Oscars Academy documentary branch and was invited by the NCE to give a masterclass at IDFA.

Natalia Koniarz

Director and academic teacher at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School in Poland, Natalia Koniarz's feature documentary Silver won seven awards at the Krakow FF, including the Silver Horn and the FIPRESCI Prize, and received three awards in the main competition at the Ji.hlava IFF. The film is produced by Emmy winner Maciej Kubicki and executive produced by Academy Award winner Paweł Pawlikowski.

She has lived and worked across South America, the Middle East, and Western Europe, experiences that shaped her interest in human rights, capitalism, and social inequality. She grew up in a rural, working-class village in Poland and stays close to that culture, which keeps her allergic to slogans and attentive to ordinary lives. Ex Oriente alumna; Grand Prix winner at East Doc Platform.