While the 22nd annual edition of Hot Docs, North America's largest documentary festival, screened over 200 films from April 23 to May 3 in Toronto, the Hot Docs Conference hosted 12 sessions and over 20 workshops for filmmakers. The theme of the conference was "bioDOCversity," which focused on "speakers who experiment with story and image, utilize enterprising approaches to distribution, bring together and build communities and more." Sessions weren't restricted to film or video documentaries; one focused on radio documentaries and another on using the videogame format to tell nonfiction
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Approaching the completion of its first half-century, the Internationale Filrnfestspiele Berlin is bigger, better than ever, despite its imperiled financial base and the trauma of uprooting itself in just two years from its familiar digs in the Kurfurstendamm area, the sprawling entertainment/culture center of West Berlin. At the millennium, the Berlin festival will take up new facilities within Potsdamer Platz, now undergoing what is proclaimed as the greatest construction project in world history, on land obliterated by both wartime bombing and that long encircling empty ribbon where once
The Tribeca Film Festival continues to be a highly sought-after showcase for new longform documentary work, and an unofficial but key marketplace. Indiewire just ranked it third in prominence for docs, after Sundance and Toronto. Tribeca also continues its eclectic approach. You could find international work mixed in with US films, and styles ranged from observational to public affairs to just downright quirky. "Too many people think documentary is a genre," says programmer Cara Cusumano. "But documentary can have every genre a narrative film can be, and we are open to that range of
The International Documentary Association (IDA) is proud to announce the appointment of Simon Kilmurry to the position of Executive Director. Kilmurry will relocate from New York to Los Angeles to begin work on July 6, 2015. Kilmurry joins IDA following an illustrious 16-year tenure at POV, the long-running PBS showcase of independent documentaries, where he has served as Executive Producer since 2006. He also serves as Executive Director of American Documentary, POV’s non-profit parent organization. “It’s hard to imagine anyone better qualified to take the reins at IDA,” said Marjan Safinia
The 18th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which ran April 9 through 12 in Durham, NC, was a four-day fest crammed with documentaries, nonfiction filmmakers, producers and interested locals. In addition to film screenings, the panel discussions, sponsored by A&E IndieFilms, also attracted large crowds. Held in the Durham Convention Center's Speakeasy, the venue played host to a number of panel conversations about controversial issues facing the documentary community. All panels, which were free and open to the public, allowed small audiences to listen to industry leaders like Motto
Independent Lens and POV to stay on Mondays at 10pm On the tail of a several-month, multi-city listening tour during which leaders from PBS, ITVS, POV and WNET held town hall-style meetings with members of the independent film community, PBS today announced their new strategy to increase visibility of independent film on PBS and its affiliates. The listening tour began in the Bay Area at the San Francisco Public Library thanks in part to the efforts of the IDA and partner organizations including Indie Caucus and Kartemquin Films. We are proud to have helped ignite the process of discussing how
Before viewing Brett Morgen's new documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, I had to jump through a few online security hurdles in order to watch the film. Fear of piracy is so rampant that I got to see my own watermarked name in the corner of the screen the entire time, making it a uniquely personal experience. As a guy who played in a band around that time, saw Nirvana play their first New York show to about a dozen people, and cried in a van while on tour when I heard about Kurt Cobain's death, I was a bit nervous to see Montage of Heck. I know Morgen's work, so I didn't think it would be
Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema by Scott MacDonald Published by Oxford University Press 2015 Don't let the "Avant-Garde" reference in the title of Scott MacDonald's latest book keep you away from reading this most accessible, revealing and often intimate exploration of the evolution and convergence of these two forms of cinema. As the author acknowledges in the introduction, "'Avant-garde film' and 'documentary' not only designate different film histories, they are different kinds of terms." He then goes on to prove through the next 419 pages and 21 interviews
I first saw Barry Alexander Brown and Glenn Silber's documentary The War at Home as a high school student in Minneapolis. Their portrayal of the anti-Vietnam War protest movement in Madison, Wisconsin, had a formative impact on my development personally and politically, and as a documentary filmmaker. The film shows young people discovering themselves through a collective commitment to stop the war, using tactics that intensify from peaceful demonstrations to violent confrontations with local police and national guardsmen, to a bombing of a university building that kills a student. Watching