Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! From the Full Frame Documentary Festival website, filmmaker R.J. Cutler shares with director of programming Sadie Tillery his vision behind the program that he curated for the festival, "Perfect and Otherwise: Documenting American Politics." "Looking at the films together reveals all sorts of fascinating through
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By shining a light on what is becoming an increasingly dynamic relationship between the documentary filmmaking and journalism worlds, two recent conferences have focused attention on these two separate but occasionally overlapping and intersecting areas of inquiry and art. Add into the mix last year's Dangerous Documentaries report from the Center for Media & Social Impact, which also highlighted this relationship, and there is definitely something in the air. The two conferences, both held within the belly of major journalism schools, reveal key similarities and differences between
Way back in the analog days, in 1993, DocuClub was launched in New York as a means for filmmakers—emerging and established alike—to get together and share their works-in-progress, give and receive feedback, and make the kind of connections that sustain communities. DocuClub attracted enough attention from the New York doc community to establish itself as a membership organization and attract sponsors like HBO and A&E, as well as partnering organizations like IFP, IDA, Third World Newsreel and Arts Engine. As for screening venues, DocuClub grew accordingly, starting out in the offices of the
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! From Current, a new report commissioned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) calls for an overhaul of its relationship with the National Minority Consortia. The major hurdle identified by Coats2Coats [Consultancy] is the impaired relationship between the corporation and the consortia, which "is built
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! From Re/code, a roundup of the reviews of the long-awaited Oculus Rift. The general takeaway from the half-dozen or so reviews is that the Rift is still built for gamers. And even then, it's probably too expensive for the masses. Product reviewers are not known for brevity; plus, unlike a new Apple product or free
The 34th annual CAAMFest, produced and presented by the San Francisco-based Center for Asian American Media, blew into the Bay Area, along with some long-awaited rainstorms that tossed our umbrellas up and down the streets of Chinatown, the Mission and Oakland. And in the warm and dry screening venues around town, CAAMFest proved what it does best: showcasing documentaries about Asians and Asian Americans.
Why has A Poem Is a Naked Person, a film Les Blank considered the greatest he ever made, remained virtually unknown and unseen, until now, over 40 years after it was completed? An answer to this question can be found in the newly restored, Criterion-released Blu-Ray. (The film had a brief theatrical run last fall through Janus Films.) It is clear that such a project would never have happened if it were not for the persistence and memory of Harrod Blank, Les Blank's son. As a young boy, tagging along with his filmmaker dad in the backwaters of 1970s Oklahoma, Harrod drew admiring portraits of
This year's Berlin International Film Festival presented a special screening of Life on the Border, a gripping project initiated and produced by Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. Over the past years Ghobadi has tirelessly narrated stories of the Kurds, the largest ethnic group without a state; their population spans from southeastern Turkey to northwestern Iran, northern Iraq and northern Syria.
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! From the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik weighs in on the hot discussion this week about the Tribeca Film Festival's decision to screen the anti-vaccine doc Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Conspiracy, from physician-turned-director Andrew Wakefield. Careless actions such as those of the Tribeca Film Festival
I knew I had found a place in the documentary world that I could call home when, on the Friday night of the True/False Film Fest (March 3 – 6) in Columbia, Missouri, I found myself at an event called Campfire Stories, punctuated by campfire cuisine: in front of me, a table piled high with s’mores; on the other side of the room, another table laden with local moonshine. I used to think I was weird for recognizing the divine in the culinary pairing of beer and chocolate cookies. Enter T/F, where moonshine and s’mores co-exist happily and rule the day. Besides s’mores and moonshine (and Harold’s