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Dear IDA Community, Transition of any kind is an opportunity for reflection. In the space between two defined states, we are afforded a chance to take stock—to honor what we leave behind, hold onto the pieces that we want to carry forward, and imagine ourselves through fresh eyes. With Michael Lumpkin’s move from executive director of IDA to his exciting new role as director of AFI Docs, the first part of 2015 has been a time of transition for us at IDA. Reconsidering the skills and talents a new executive director would need to take IDA to the next level in our evolution has been an exciting

Dear Readers, As we were going to press, the great Albert Maysles passed away at 88, culminating a rich and expansive life and even more so, a brilliant and inspiring career. With his comrades at Drew Associates, he blew the doors open to a new way of seeing and experiencing the documentary form. He took us there, and we got to know the people behind both the most famous figures of the day and the ordinary strangers, who would become indelible characters before Maysles’ masterful camera work. Maysles originally trained as a psychologist, and although he left that career path, the discipline

In 2014, Northwestern University announced the launch of a new Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Media, to be housed in the School of Communications and helmed by Debra Tolchinsky, a documentary filmmaker and artist whose breadth of experience in the arts is well suited to the program's emphasis on working across disciplines and embracing innovation. Now, in the middle of the inaugural cohort's first year, Tolchinsky acknowledges that launching a new program "is a bit like Whac-A-Mole—lots of things to design and figure out," but she is also already seeing the range of students drawn to the

Documentarians face quandaries at every phase of the process. Is it ethical to film this subject? What footage do I include? Do I have a "right" to tell this story? What is most important—a literal truth, a higher truth or both? What's more, filmmakers juggle competing arenas of responsibility—to their subjects, audience, funders and themselves—while working in relative isolation. To discuss how these moments are navigated, Documentary Magazine spoke with three established filmmakers: Steve James ( Life Itself; The Interrupters; Hoop Dreams), Juliana Brannum ( LaDonna Harris: Indian 101

This article was co-authored by Chris Palmer and filmmaker Shannon Lawrence. Documentary filmmaking requires acknowledgement and application of industry ethics such as integrity of content and respectful, non-exploitative filming relationships. Audiences are typically unconcerned about filmmaking ethics, particularly in reference to science and educational films. It is, however, under this categorical umbrella that some of the most serious ethical grievances have taken place. Wildlife and environmental filmmaking involves perhaps the most complicated issues of ethics due to the position of its

One of your characters confesses a life-changing secret to his wife while you're filming—should you use it? Your character said something terrific in pre-interview but didn't in the filmed interview—should you prompt him? A secondary character who's in some essential scenes decides to pull out, and you're on deadline with a fine cut. Do you pressure her? Tell her it’s too late? Say OK and get ready for some long days in the edit room? At the GETTING REAL conference, filmmakers shared their ethical dilemmas with an audience that, often, had faced similar challenges, and got the chance to vote

In some ways it's difficult to imagine what America was like before 1971. Communism had been represented for decades in the media as an Orwellian hell, where neighbors spied on neighbors, the government monitored every utterance, and even a harmless joke at the government's expense could sentence a person to a Siberian gulag. America, by contrast, was considered the land of free and unbridled speech—the McCarthy Era notwithstanding. Certainly by the late 1960s, many people had come to suspect that the government was keeping tabs on some of the more violent dissident groups of the time. But for

Back in 2001, filmmaker Allison Berg thought she was prepared. She was in the process of editing her first documentary film, Witches in Exile, when a fire broke out in her neighbor's apartment. While her building was evacuated, she watched in horror from the sidewalk below as firefighters doused her building with water, uncertain whether the footage she thought was safe might be lost forever. Berg had made copies of all her footage for Witches in Exile but everything was stored in the apartment. If the fire had spread, she would have lost the entire film. From this experience, lessons were

The 33rd CAAMFest—the Center for Asian American Media’s Asian-American film festival—has wrapped after 10 days of cinema, food and music in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. Although the theme of this year’s event, the largest Asian/Pacific Islander film festival in the world, was travel and destinations, my own festival experience resonated with notions of home: leaving home, coming home, staying home, recognizing home after a long absence. And that interpretation is fine with CAAMFest, whose vision is pluralistic and its audience possibly the most diverse of all Bay Area cultural events

At SXSW, documentaries are a big feature of the film component, as SXSW itself metastasizes from a one-time tripartite festival (films, tech, music) into a host of mini-fests that focus on everything from journalism to sports to health to education to fashion to retail. But don’t look for a theme, unless it’s “eclectic.” In the feature competition, Scott Christopherson and Brad Barber’s Peace Officer won the Grand Jury Prize, as well as the Audience Award. Competitors were highly diverse in style and subject, including Ron Nyswaner’s She’s the Best Thing in It, an engaging and compelling