There’s an age-old question that every filmmaker wrestles with: How to start a film? In the case of Apart, it took until the end of editing to find the beginning. Apart, by Oscar-nominated Jennifer Redfearn and Tim Metzger, takes an intimate look at three incarcerated women trying to maintain relationships with their children. The film follows them on their journey through an innovative reentry program and after release, as they try to repair the damage from years of separation. Partners in life and in film, co-producers Redfearn and Metzger talked to over two-dozen women in Cleveland’s
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I always imagine Jean Tsien in constant motion, even though her work as an editor and producer usually means hours of sitting at a computer. Her films propel you through histories and lives with emotional force and intellect, and she crafts documentaries that are, at once, intimate personal stories and far-reaching interrogations into questions of race, politics and culture that have defined our times. In her path-breaking 38-year career, Tsien represents the documentary field as a Governor of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. She has edited for a master class-worth of
By Bedatri D. Choudhury and Tom White The COVID-inspired online edition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival earned universal kudos, and a staggering global audience of 600,000. But with the pandemic seemingly ebbing in the final quarter of last year, the Delta variant notwithstanding, Festival Director Tabitha Jackson and her team announced that it would take a flyer on a hybrid in-person/virtual format. Then came the Omicron variant. Up until two weeks before the festival, all eyes were cast on Park City. But, with daily case counts reaching staggering numbers around the world, the festival
Roger Ross Williams' list of accolades is mind-blowing. In 2010, he became the first Black director to win an Academy Award, for Best Documentary Short Subject. The film, Music by Prudence—which followed a troupe of musicians with disabilities in Zimbabwe—was his first documentary as a director. Williams followed that success with God Loves Uganda; the Academy Award-nominated, and Emmy and Sundance Film Festival award-winning Life, Animated; the Emmy Award-nominated Traveling While Black; and The Apollo, which won the 2020 Emmy for Outstanding Directing. This past year he produced and directed
BY Bedatri D. Choudhury & Tom White
IDA's four-decade history has seen the beginning and end of many programs, but few have withstood the test of time like our Fiscal Sponsorship program. IDA began offering fiscal sponsorships to support independent documentary filmmakers in 1986, and since then we have supported hundreds of films from all over the world. These IDA-supported documentaries have won prestigious awards, from Sundance Film Festival to Peabody Awards; been nominated for Academy Awards; and, most importantly, changed countless lives. To celebrate IDA's 40th anniversary and our second longest-running program, here is a
Forty years ago, on February 6, David L. Wolper and 74 other filmmakers answered a classified ad announcing the first meeting of the International Documentary Association (IDA). They met in Los Angeles, seeking to elevate documentaries in the film industry and beyond. While both IDA and the larger nonfiction community have continued to transform in size and form, we are revisiting some key moments and boxed-up memories on this day of celebration. 1980s Within two years, IDA was hosting numerous educational seminars and had already organized the first annual DocuDay—an all-day, back-to-back
Roadrunner, Oscar-winner Morgan Neville’s documentary film about chef and cultural icon Anthony Bourdain, sparked a heated debate last summer when the filmmaker revealed to The New Yorker that three lines in the film—that sounded like they were being spoken by Bourdain, who died in 2018—were generated using AI technology. Neville explained to the magazine’s Helen Rosner that the three quotes, which were Bourdain’s written words, were spoken by an AI model of his voice created using roughly a dozen hours of recordings of Bourdain. Of his decision to employ this "modern storytelling technique,"
In our bid to make this 40th anniversary issue somewhat of a time capsule, we asked our members to send in photographs—new and old—with the cameras they have worked with. Placing them on a timeline, what emerged was a technological history that, by constantly evolving in access, portability and cost efficiency, made space for more and more people to start recording their stories, making their films, and letting the world know of the unique perspective with which they see the world around them. We thank you for sharing these images with us, and hope you’d enjoy taking this trip down memory lane
The IDA Documentary Awards have been a part of our programmatic mix for nearly as long as IDA’s life. Thanks to the efforts of former Board President Harrison Engle, with additional assistance from the late Gabor Kalman, the Awards launched in 1985, with five honorees for Distinguished Documentary Achievement, as well as a Career Achievement Award, which went to Pare Lorentz—whose name graces both an award for a feature or short documentary that reflects the spirit and tradition of Lorentz’s work, and a documentary fund—and a Preservation and Scholarship Award, going that year to renowned