Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. October is a month for expressions–whether it be through celebrating LGBTQ+ History Month, or syncing with the spooky season. This week’s list of documentaries highlights narratives, many of which are queer, rooted in self-expression in pursuit of fulfillment. From Outfest’s the outmuseum.org comes Pele (Skin), a short documentary by Adam Golub and Liana Nigri that shares the experiences of a trans teenager and activist living on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Rather than
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Winner of the Directing Award for US Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Reid Davenport’s debut feature, I Didn’t See You There, is, according to the Stanford-trained filmmaker, a doc “about disability from an overtly political perspective”— i.e., the kind of cinematic project the TED fellow and one of DOC NYC’s 2020 “40 Filmmakers Under 40” has long been pursuing with his accolade-laden shorts ( A Cerebral Game; Wheelchair Diaries: One Step Up; Ramped up, et al). And it’s equally an art film; informed by the personally lensed work of visionaries ranging from Chantal Ackerman to
“Right now the system—that's the sad part of this collapsing system—is basically taking advantage that there are so many filmmakers that are clueless,” Cinema Tropical Co-Founder Carlos A. Gutiérrez shares out loud what everyone knows about distribution and exhibition. The system is broken and opaque, and the consolidation of the market is at an all-time high. The streaming giants are calling the shots, one true-crime show after another, having become de facto studios, distributors and exhibitors all at once—monopolies who decide what everyone watches. Yet, they also fund much of the system
For tourists, the Philippine island of Palawan is a tropical paradise. For illegal loggers, it’s a place to plunder one of the last great rainforests. For locals defending the trees in lieu of government action, it’s a deadly place to work. Delikado means danger in Tagalog. When Australian journalist Karl Malakunas set out to make his first film a decade ago, he was then Philippine bureau chief of Agence France-Presse and he wanted to make a film about eco-tourism there. But when his main contact was murdered, the project shifted to land defenders in general and the Palawan NGO Network Inc.
A Letter From Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs, Director of Artist Accelerator Program at Sundance Institute Nonfiction storytellers and their work have been deeply impacted by recent world events, public health crises, and overdue reckonings. The impact on the field has been far-reaching and complex. This has manifested in various ways including the ongoing need to address sustainability, safety, and security, as well as a desire for holistic culture change to make the field more inclusive, accessible, and grounded in values-based ethics-first filmmaking practice. Six years ago, Sundance Institute and
IDA's Logan Elevate Grant, which is made possible through the generosity of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, aims to uplift emerging filmmakers. This year, the grant program awards $30,000 to three women and nonbinary filmmakers of color directing feature-length journalistic documentary films. This year's grantees are Paige Bethmann, Chelsea Hernandez, and Zippy Kimundu. Growing up in Kenya, Kimundu says she saw her country through everyone else’s lens. She worked as an editor for 10 years, and while putting together a documentary for a British television station, she felt conflicted over
Editors’ Note: This year marks a leadership change at DOC NYC, the largest documentary festival in the United States. Jaie Laplante, the former director of the Miami Film Festival, takes the reins as DOC NYC’s artistic director from Thom Powers, who held the position for 12 years. In this interview, he describes the transition and talks to Laplante. The origin story of DOC NYC goes something like this. In the late aughts, Raphaela Neihausen and I were newly married and running a weekly documentary series called Stranger Than Fiction at New York’s IFC Center. The theater’s general manager, John
POV, the longest-running showcase of independent documentaries on PBS, turns 35 this year. Its executive producer since May 2021, Erika Dilday, had her hand at the helm of this 35th season. She came to POV from Futuro Media Group, a multimedia journalistic nonprofit committed to telling overlooked stories, where she was CEO. Before that, she was executive director of Maysles Documentary Center. Here she talks about the current season of POV, what her father taught her about diversity, the logistics of scouting for films, and her upcoming keynote address at IDA’s Getting Real 2022 conference
The year 2020 was a pivotal one for Kenyan documentaries—and for Docubox, the East African film fund created by Kenyan filmmaker and administrator Judy Kibinge in 2013. Christopher King and Maia Lekow’s The Letter, one of the recipients of Docubox’s inaugural development and production funding round, was Kenya’s pick for the Academy Award for Best International Film. Even though the film—a poignant investigation of elder abuse in a Kenyan rural community— was not shortlisted, it enjoyed considerable acclaim and was screened at several high-profile film festivals. Softie, another film that
Rea Tajiri is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and educator who creates installation, documentary and experimental films. Her work situates itself in poetic, non-traditional storytelling forms to encourage dialog and reflection around buried histories. Tajiri is a Sansei who grew up in Rogers Park, Chicago and Van Nuys, California. She earned her BFA and MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts where she studied post-studio art. Upon graduation, Tajiri began working in video art, two early shorts were included in the Whitney Biennials of 1989 and 1991. One of these works