The final chord of "the Blackfish effect" has finally resounded, with a stunning and unprecedented corporate policy announcement from SeaWorld. In January 2013, the documentary Blackfish premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, telling the story "about Tilikum, a performing killer whale that killed several people while in captivity," according to the official film synopsis. Three years later—a period marked by sustained activism, multi-platform distribution and unrelenting media coverage— SeaWorld officially announced on March 17, 2016, that it will officially end its orca breeding program and
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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! Following SeaWorld's announcement this week that it would stop breeding orcas, the Los Angeles Times spoke with Blackfish filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite about the major impact her doc has made on changing perceptions and behavior. "It was constant, the amount of information I had to learn every day to continue
At SXSW this year, you could find great pleasure in films at two extremes of the commercially viable spectrum: the idiosyncratic passion project at one end, and the big and shiny, well-crafted work that may already be linked to a brand name. Both were a lot of fun to find, and they shared the ability to deliver a sense of discovery, of seeing past the obvious, while offering respect to both subject and audience. On the passion-project side, one of the quirkiest was Irish film critic Mark Cousins' I Am Belfast. Cousins, a film lover who seems to want to give the form a bear hug at every
We’ve spoken to quite a few of you who are excited to apply to the freshly launched Miller / Packan Film Fund, so we went straight to the source and asked Hugh Rogovy, Founder and President of the Rogovy Foundation, to answer a few questions about their latest philanthropic endeavor. In this #FunderFriday installment, you will hear directly from Hugh what inspired the grant’s creation and how your project can get noticed amidst the many fantastic films applying for this highly competitive doc fund. What inspired the Foundation to create the Miller / Packan Film Fund? Documentary films can have
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! The Los Angeles Times' Steven Zeitchik reports from True/False on four venturesome trends in the documentary form. These new anti-documentaries are in a sense more fundamental shifts, since they're crafted as feature films, sometimes with scripts to match. But their issues are also more complicated, since they're
Another year means another chance to get funds for your documentary! Below is your essential guide to grants, awards, open calls, and opportunities to be had in the first half of 2016. GRANT DEADLINES ITVS - INDEPENDENT LENS Independent Lens is currently seeking submissions of films in advanced rough cut or fine cut stage or completed films to broadcast during the October 2016 - June 2017 season. Independent Lens films are often character driven stories, and are known for compelling storytelling, innovation, and diversity. Independent Lens welcomes individual expression and is committed to
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 San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area docmakers Dawn Porter and Pete Nicks, among others, weigh in on #OscarsSoWhite and the need for diversity: It's a lesson that Nicks, 47, and other African American filmmakers from the Bay Area say is often left out of the heated conversations about Oscar inclusion: that
"Quality over quantity." If you were a documentary filmmaker attending the 18th annual Realscreen Summit in Washington, DC earlier this month, that was the overwhelming message. Both Discovery and the National Geographic Channels hammered away about the concept of "big ideas" and "big events." And "volume" and "tonnage"? They are now dirty words. Other key presentations revolved around virtual reality, platform power players and diversity behind and in front of the camera. Moving into its new digs at the Marriott Marquis, the Summit had plenty to offer for the more than 2,000 attendees—which
History is often fragmented, patched with fictions and intricate inconsistencies. This year's International Forum of New Cinema—in short, the Forum—founded in the 1960s as a more politically and socially conscious counterweight to the Berlinale's Main Competition, traversed the cinematic landscapes of (geo-) political and personal histories of place. One focus of this year's Forum was the Middle East, a region in flux that is no stranger to civil wars. The Arab film scene has been burgeoning despite war seizing the Middle East, nation states disintegrating and funding sources coming to a
In all the years I've covered the Sundance Film Festival, I've never focused my coverage on the short form. Well, mea culpa; it's about time. Over the past decade or so, in concert with the dramatic growth and expansion of the Internet, we have witnessed an explosion of online content—particularly documentary shorts—from longstanding publications like The New York Times, The Atlantic and The New Yorker, to Internet giants like YouTube and Vice and Vimeo, to omnibus projects like Cinelan's WE THE ECONOMY, to groundbreaking new ventures like Field of Vision. There's even a channel, Shorts HD