Giving heartland audiences a true international program, the 27th annual Starz Denver International Film Festival (SDIFF) screened 189 features and shorts from 34 countries during its 10-day run last October. One of the most highly anticipated events on Denver's fall cultural calendar, SDIFF treats nonfiction films admirably, allocating them prime screening times and inviting numerous documentary filmmakers to participate in the festival. "We've always taken the nonfiction genre seriously and always had a lot of documentaries," says the festival's co-founder and artistic director Ron Henderson
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Ricky Leacock tells the following story about Robert Flaherty: "Flaherty was filming in the Arctic when he saw a man carving a piece of wood. He asked the man what he was carving. The man replied, 'I don't know. I got to find it.'" The anecdote encapsulates Leacock's philosophy of documentary filmmaking, an approach that was partially molded in the crucible of his experiences as Flaherty's cameraman on Louisiana Story. "I never worked with anyone who had an understanding of film like Flaherty," Leacock says. "He taught me how to look. Before then, everything was controlled. Most filmmakers
A blast of arctic air hit the desert city of Palm Springs, Calif., last week, during its 24th International Film Festival; Park City, Utah-type dress was more appropriate than the usual sandals-and-shorts ensembles. More than 130,000 attended the festival, which spotlighted 36 feature documentaries among the 182 films, over the course of 11 days. The Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) awards two major honors to documentaries: the Audience Award, which went to Ramona Diaz's Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey , and the John Schlesinger Award, a juried prize for best debut
This new program will make Doc U available to IDA members around the world.
Mark Samels' experience working in "just about every capacity of the business," including as a producer, director, cameraman, editor and sound recordist, has helped shape his decade-long tenure as executive producer of the PBS history series American Experience. Under Samels, who first joined the series as a senior producer in 1997 before being named executive producer in 2003, American Experience has been honored with Oscar nominations, Audience and Grand Jury Awards at the Sundance Film Festival, multiple Primetime Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia Awards and several IDA Documentary Awards
A review of 'First Cut 2: More Conversations with Film Editors,' by Gabriella Oldham.
Just as the Internet has changed the way we get news and information, plan vacations, communicate with friends and purchase goods, so, too, is it changing the way documentary makers reach and influence audiences. When the words "Web" and "documentary" are joined together the first image that often comes to mind is a linear film or video playing over the Internet on the computer screen. However, the multimedia, interactive characteristics of the Internet provide documentary makers with a unique medium to create nonlinear Web productions that combine photography, text, audio, video, animation
Dear IDA Community, A few weeks ago, I decided to write this issue's column about inspiration. But now, as my deadline approaches and I'm facing an empty page, I find it hard to reconnect with that inspiration. Where did the clarity, which felt so tangible in the moment, go? Inspiration is a tricky thing. When we are lucky enough to have a taste of it, it's the most powerful, intoxicating and consuming drug. And then, just as quickly, it evaporates. But often, a small dose can be all we need to push forward. Let's be honest. We all know that there's not much that is glamorous about being a
I first saw Heddy Honigmann's film Crazy at a retrospective of her work at New York's Museum of Modern Art. I went into the screening expecting a war film, and instead found a deeply affecting meditation on music and memory. Most of us can relate to hearing a certain song that takes us back to a seminal moment in our lives. Honigmann uses this universal experience to peer into the psyche of soldiers. In the film, she asks Dutch United Nations peacekeeping veterans to talk about a piece of music that they relied upon to maintain their sanity in horrific circumstances. Using music to trigger