New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright remembers colleagues asking, “Why do you live in Texas?” when his location shouldn’t have been exceptional
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That NoCut has no physical office, that it is registered in Romania and India (unofficially floating into Belgium), and that its members frequently navigate three different time zones to set up meetings, are all appropriate given its origin story. Rothe, Rinaldi, and Hanes met ten years ago as classmates in DocNomads, the Erasmus Mundus master’s program in documentary filmmaking. Run by a consortium of three universities in Portugal, Hungary, and Belgium, DocNomads is a fully funded course for students from all over the globe, with an emphasis on teamwork and coproduction, which explains why many of its graduates often end up working with each other later. Helping each other with student projects, the three women developed a working rapport even as they fell into a thick friendship.
Few filmmakers have as recognizable a style as Bill Morrison. Those with even a passing familiarity with his work will think of degraded film stock
Jean-Marie Teno is Africa’s preeminent documentary filmmaker. With a critical eye and a sharp wit, he questions the established truth, exposes the
Phantoms of the Sierra Madre Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes made his name with confrontational documentaries in which he explores the motivations
On January 24, by unanimous vote, documentary filmmakers got a big boost from Congress. The House of Representatives passed the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (aka the PRESS Act). It’s a journalist-protection bill that could easily have been called the Protect All Documentarians Act. Although the PRESS Act makes no specific mention of documentary filmmakers, federal courts uniformly include documentary filmmakers in their definitions of journalists. In fact, documentarians stand to be one of the bill’s biggest beneficiaries.
Amid industry disruption, filmmakers search for marketing and data solutions in community.
In a world rent asunder, conference speakers thrust documentary ethics into reality.
Two days before the 10th edition of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival (KPFF) began, India roiled in a frenzy of celebration. All the agencies of command and control announced the January 22 consecration of the Ram Mandir—the enthronement of the Hindu deity Rama in his alleged birthplace, Ayodhya—as a day for pomp and self-congratulation. Many states declared it a public holiday. The building of the Ram Mandir in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on the devastated powder of a 16th-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, which was dismantled brick by brick by Hindutva mobs in 1992—a friend once called this destruction one of the most fissiparous acts in the history of independent India—marked the psychic normalization of a supposedly secular democracy into a so-called Hindu Rashtra, a nation for and of Hindus.
Political statements are hardly foreign to a film festival’s red carpet, especially during such politically unsettled times. Yet there are statements that hold particularly immense power and urgency, in light of the inconceivable suffering and loss of civilian life in some parts of the world. Such were the ones calling for “Ceasefire Now [in Gaza],” stitched onto the back of the black dresses of Danish film producer Katrin Pors and American director Eliza Hittman, who trod the red carpet ahead of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival’s opening gala.