Editor's Note: Hans-Robert Eisenhauer, the longtime documentary commissioning editor at ZDF-Arte and a documentary producer for Ventana-Film, Germany, is experiencing an unexpectedly long delay in obtaining his visa to travel to Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards and IDA’s DocuDay. Eisenhauer is one of the producers of Talal Derkl's Of Fathers and Sons , one of the five feature documentaries nominated for an Academy Award. The IDA has sent this letter of support to the US Consul General in Frankfurt to process Eisenhauer's visa swiftly. Please join in our support for Eisenhauer to enter
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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! Vanity Fair’s Laura Bradley talks to directors Betsy West, Julia Cohen and Chai Vasarhelyi about why the Best Documentary category has become “an Oscar haven for female directors” over the past ten years. Why has this category made deeper strides than the awards’ narrative categories? Perhaps it’s because the
If you are an urban Indian woman, chances are that you’ve been asked at some point to desist from touching or staining or entering spaces while on your period. Temples and other religious sites are off limits. In certain homes, so are kitchens. This is such a normalized phenomenon, that most Indian women will not blink at it. When buying pads at the local store, chances are that the owner has wrapped the pack in newspaper so your period will remain private, not to be carried or seen out in the open. In Bengal, even today, albeit under protest by feminists, the term “shorir kharap,” or sickness
Filmmaker Skye Fitzgerald’s upbringing in Oregon defied the norm, even in a state known for alternative lifestyles. Consider the family dog: his name, Spot, was conventional, but the breed was not. “Half-dingo, half, probably German Shepherd, we think,” Fitzgerald tells Documentary. Fitzgerald spent his teenage years living in Spartan conditions, in a rural dwelling that lacked electricity and running water—his parents’ choice. “It taught me a lot of things,” he observes. “It taught me that you don’t take things for granted, and to appreciate the simple things in life.” That experience of
In his third Academy Award-nominated film, Marshall Curry delivers a striking variation on his previous nominees, Street Fight and If a Tree Falls. A Night at the Garden is a seven-minute horror show taking place in an America we both thought we knew better and know all too well. In 1939, several years into Hitler’s reign of terror and months away from his invasion of Poland, American Nazis staged a rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden—and 20,000 hale-and-hearty people showed up. In the film, the leader of the party rails against the media and the Jews, and clamors for “America First
If we listed Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s numerous accolades, films, documentary news programs and teaching credentials—namely all the reasons they were the perfect pair to make RBG—we’d have no room for anything else. Suffice it to say, West and Cohen had been on the path to telling Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s story for quite some time, even if it wasn’t always apparent. The two journalist-filmmakers were introduced by a mutual friend and colleague in 2011, when West was looking for a producer on Makers: Women Who Make America, a PBS series about the modern women’s movement
“I did whatever I needed to do to fit into a group of people who hated the color of my skin… I wanted love. I wanted to feel love, so yeah, I just made friends with monsters.” — Cornelius Walker With politicians being outed for past ethnic slurs and cultural insensitivity, the topic of race is a volatile one, but that’s not exactly a news flash. There’s no shortage of drama where the clash between races is concerned, and when the volatility of adolescence gets added to the mix, well, violence is seldom in short supply. But then from the other side of the Atlantic comes Black Sheep, a short
What does it mean to die well in the 21st century, and how does it feel? End Game, from longtime collaborators Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman ( The Celluloid Closet; Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt), takes us inside the world of hospice and palliative care, following the journey of terminally ill patients, their families and caretakers in two cutting-edge San Francisco facilities. Documentary spoke with the Oscar-winning filmmakers about their vérité approach to a universal subject that most of us spend our whole lives avoiding. DOCUMENTARY: What would an Oscar win do for End Game
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer captures the roiling debauchery of the Disco Era of the 1970s--the nucleus of which was Studio 54, the club whose clientele was a massive swirl of uptown and downtown culture, the gay community and A-list celebrities. Studio 54 premieres February 11 on A&E. The Oscar-nominated Hale County, This Morning This Evening premieres February 11 on Independent Lens. Director RaMell Ross creates an immersive cinematic reverie of African American life in rural
While Talal Derki was working on his first documentary feature—the Sundance-winning Return to Homs, a story that goes behind the barricades in the war-torn city of Homs, Syria, to follow 19-year-old Basset and his comrades in their quest for a successful revolution against the Assad regime—the seeds of his second documentary were sown. In Homs, he met a man who, he would later learn, was teaching his five-year-old son how to use weapons. The image lodged into Derki’s mind, but it wasn’t something he was able to use in Return to Homs, because his story focused on a more historical narrative