Dear Readers, The Documentary Space…is vast and global and diffuse and interconnected. And while we at the IDA and Documentary magazine have made great strides in recent years to be true to the “International” side of our name, we are always looking to improve our global service, with our active presence at festivals and markets around the world, the global representation at the past two Getting Real conferences, and a significant growth in editorial coverage of the Pacific Rim, Latin America and Europe, So, think of this issue as a promissory note to keep our eyes on the “I” in IDA, with an
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Described by The Guardian as “the world’s best film school,” the UK’s National Film and Television School runs more than 30 MA, Diploma and Certificate courses from its base in Beaconsfield, 25 miles west of London. The Directing Documentary strand is a veritable who’s who of British-authored documentary; its alumni include Kim Longinotto, Nick Broomfield, Molly Dineen and Sean McAllister. The Directing Documentary graduation films are always top notch, and dominate the student documentary awards landscape: when I was a judge for the student award for the Griersons recently, nearly every
Investigative documentary filmmaking is at its best when it’s telling difficult, controversial and even dangerous stories that push boundaries and audiences beyond their comfort zone. But that kind of filmmaking can present legal challenges and risks for filmmakers. Among those legal risks is litigation. If a subject (or even a minor character) in your film believes that she or he is shown in a false, unfair or unfavorable light, you may find yourself on the receiving end of a civil complaint alleging, for example, defamation or invasion of privacy. And as a result, you could find yourself
On July 20, 2019 at 2:56 p.m. UTC, it will be 50 years to the minute from when a human being stepped onto the moon for the first time. NASA’s successful Apollo 11 mission will have—at a time of uncertainty the world over—brought an entire planet’s population together, even if just for a moment. Over half a century later, the world might still be as uncertain, especially when the advance of climate change is brought into the fold, and peoples’ collective consciousness is decidedly fractured. But there is a group of three women—each with distinctive talents—who have had one goal of bringing us
Dear IDA Community, The theme of the Spring 2019 Documentary focused on “international” storytelling. We covered the innovate work of The Why Foundation and the impact that DocMontevideo and CCDoc are having in Latin America, as well a number of films from outside the US. In an effort to graphically illustrate that “international” theme on the cover and celebrate the global nature of this art form, we used translations of the word “documentary” in multiple languages. To our chagrin, we screwed up on the cover. The Arabic translation was wrong—thank you, Mustafa Zeno, Talal Derki and others
In 1934, Claude Neal, a 23-year-old African-American farm worker was accused of the rape and murder of a young white woman. Eight days later he was kidnapped from jail, tortured, mutilated and lynched in front of the Marianna, Florida courthouse. Neal’s story still haunts the community of Marianna and is the catalyst for The Changing Same, the latest documentary from husband/wife filmmaking team Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson ( American Promise). The film, which premieres July 22 on POV, explores, through four characters, a community struggling with the foreboding legacy of America’s
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! The advertising software company AppNexus hopes US regulators and politicians will launch an antitrust investigation against former partner, YouTube. Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw and Mark Bergen explore the controversial advertising tactics of YouTube and Google that AppNexus believes has eliminated competition and
“Eagle, Houston. You are go for landing, over.” With this command, issued by Mission Control Center on July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts were one step closer to achieving their goal of reaching the Sea of Tranquility. But this destination—218,000 miles away—was the culmination of a decade’s worth of countless tests, man-hours and effort. The 50th anniversary of NASA’s most celebrated mission, the Lunar Landing, has spawned a slew of new documentaries this year. Among these are Apollo 11 by Todd Douglas Miller (CNN Films/NEON, with MacGillivray Freeman Films handling the distribution of
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. In 1917, nearly 2,000 immigrant miners in the small town of Brisbee, Arizona went on strike for better wages and safer working conditions. In response, they were violently rounded up in cattle cars and left the desert to die. Robert Greene’s Bisbee ‘17 follows several members of the town as they commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Bisbee Deportation. The film combines documentary and scripted elements to depict dramatized scenes based on subjective versions of the story
AFI DOCS is a festival well attuned to its environment in Washington, DC, despite its Los Angeles base. Films The festival features recent (not necessarily premiere), topical work within the broad mainstream of documentary filmmaking. Offerings new to DC but known to the festival circuit ranged from David Charles Rodrigues’ Gay Chorus Deep South, about Oakland and San Francisco choral groups visiting churches in the traditionally anti-gay region, to the nostalgic Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, to Jennifer McShane’s community-policing good-news film