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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Currently streaming at Filmstruck is Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, the groundbreaking 1977 documentary in which a group of gay and lesbian individuals share their personal stories about identity, prejudice, and acceptance. The Village Voice called it "extraordinary...still enormously powerful today." Starting its four-night run on Showtime Monday, June 12 at 9pm is Oliver Stone's The Putin Interviews, in which the controversial filmmaker sits down with the

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! In Huffington Post, filmmaker Michael Moore announces the debut of TrumpiLeaks. Today, I’m launching TrumpiLeaks, a site that will enable courageous whistleblowers to privately communicate with me and my team. Patriotic Americans in government, law enforcement or the private sector with knowledge of crimes

Going into this year's Cannes Film Festival, it was clear no documentary would win the Palme d'or, the festival's top prize. Not a single nonfiction film made the cut for competition, rendering the Palme possibility moot. One documentary did earn recognition as an "Out of Competition" selection— Visages Villages (Faces Places), co-directed by Agnès Varda and the French artist/photographer known simply as JR. Several critics— The New York Times' Manohla Dargis among them— argued the film should have been programmed in competition. Dargis hailed it as "an exquisite, achingly moving nonfiction

In our stratified American society, one's level of education is a major determinant of economic status, providing the credentials that can turn a job into a career. Night School, a new documentary from the Emmy-winning filmmaker Andrew Cohn, takes a humanistic, character-driven approach to the experience of 21st century urban poverty by focusing on adult students in Indianapolis—a city with one of the lowest graduation rates in the country—who belatedly attempt to earn high school diplomas while juggling a whole host of extracurricular challenges. Night School concentrates its lens on the

Margaret Byrne's Raising Bertie (executive produced by J. Cole) is an intimate, six-year journey into the lives of three young, African-American men. Like others their age, Davonte "Dada" Harrell, Reginald "Junior" Askew and David "Bud" Perry face such daunting tasks as finishing high school, finding steady employment and navigating the rollercoaster ride into adulthood. That they attempt to do all this in rural Bertie County, North Carolina—where every odd is stacked against them—is both admirable and enlightening (at least to those of us residing in our urban and coastal bubbles). And it’s

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast (Dir.: Danny Gold; Prod.: George Shapiro), currently available on HBO Now and HBO Go, celebrates the joy of ageing, as related by some of the most vital nonagenarians in the business—Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, Mel Brooks and Dick Van Dyke for starters, along with a host of runners, skydivers and woodworkers who live to stay off the obituary page. Marie-Hélène Rebois' In the Steps of Tricia Brown, available on DVD through Icarus Films

Letters from Baghdad, a new feature-length historical documentary that is coming to US theaters on June 2, chronicles the story of a woman who participated in the establishment of the state of Iraq, yet whose name has been written out of history. The film, co-directed by Sabine Krayenbuehl and Zeva Oelbaum, reconstructs the life of English political officer and archaeologist Gertrude Bell, who, due to her influence in the Middle East following World War I, became informally known as the "female" Lawrence of Arabia and one of the few representatives of the British powerhouse "remembered by the

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 Paste, Sean L. Malin reflects upon Field Of Vision's documentary reportage. With the battle for a free press increasingly fraught, the mere fact that the outlet produces, promotes and releases episodic televisual journalism pro bono is almost heroic in the context of most broadcast and cable news coverage

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 Deadline, Michael Cieply reports that the Academy's documentary branch is poised to expand next month. The documentary tribe is surging. Actors are slipping back. This might represent a bow toward digital filmmaking, fresh interest in the documentary form, or make-good for severe under-representation in the

Amir Bar-Lev is a documentarian who does not shy away from controversy. A skilled storyteller and filmmaker, he knows that with conflict comes drama, and with drama comes the stuff that great stories are made of. At first glance, his documentary about the Grateful Dead, Long Strange Trip, would appear to lack the requisite drama - what could possibly contain less conflict than fields and stadiums filled with blissed-out hippies groovin' to the music of their favorite band? As it turns out, that necessary resistance and conflict comes from the band itself. "They weren't really responsive to a