When Tony Tabatznik founded the Bertha Foundation in 2009, he felt strongly that if you could connect storytellers, lawyers and activists, you have a formidable team for fighting for social change. After attending the Sundance Film Festival for several years, Tabatznik embraced the nonfiction media landscape as a major means to effect that change. In its brief life, the Bertha Foundation—through the Bertha Film Fund, the Bertha BRITDOC Connect Fund, the Bertha BRITDOC Documentary Journalism Fund and the IDFA Bertha Fund—has helped countless documentaries from around the world get made, get
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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! From CNN, filmmaker Roger Ross Williams on the making of his doc Blackface, about a troubling holiday tradition in The Netherlands, his adopted country: When I decided to make Blackface, a short film about Black Pete [a character in black face who gives candy to children during Sinterklaas, the most popular Dutch
Louie Psihoyos started his career as a photographer with an eye towards social change. He came to see that he could be even more effective as a filmmaker and made a major impact with his 2009 Academy Award-winning film, The Cove. He and his partners are back with a film designed to make people think deeply about the fact that our planet is racing towards a mass extinction. He was kind enough to take time out to thoughtfully answer our questions about craft and action. As the world’s leaders converge in Paris for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, Racing Extinction hits the
IDFA’s DocLab conference and exhibit, coordinated by Caspar Sonnen, intersects with IDFA’s cornucopia of international documentary only occasionally. Instead, the DocLab is where you go to look at the edge of technical experiment in storytelling. This year we looked over the edge, into virtual reality—the lunchbox-on-the-face experience that wants to be the next big thing. A Future in Non-linear Storytelling How far we are away from the next big thing was hinted at by Google VR filmmaker Jessica Brillart. In her keynote, she challenged the audience to think about VR experience more in terms of
In the business world, we're familiar with the terms CEO, CFO and COO. But Ted Sarandos may be the country's best known and most successful CCO—Chief Content Officer. He holds that title at Netflix, where he has revolutionized the television industry with original programming ( House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), turning "binge-watching" into a cultural phenomenon. As the Netflix slate grows under Sarandos, so does its ambitions in the nonfiction realm. This month it announced the acquisition of a 10-part documentary series Making a Murderer (upping the ante on
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! KPCC's The Frame spoke with Nancy Tartaglione of Deadline.com about the role that Parisian cinemas could play in the collective healing process: Within France, the movie theaters were closed beginning Saturday, and that was actually meant to last for two days, but some of the major exhibitors started opening again
Archival and preservation issues took center stage at DOC NYC on Tuesday, as IDA and the Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors (ACSIL) co-presented a full day of programming in this important area. Following a keynote address by filmmaker and Schomburg Center motion picture curator Shola Lynch, a series of four panels covered a wide range of topics: Negotiating Rights, Monetize Your Outtakes, Preservation & Archives and Crafting a Story with Archival. Featuring a mix of ACSIL members, veteran doc filmmakers and other experts in the field, the discussions highlighted a diverse range
Gordon Quinn co-founded Kartemquin Films, 50 years ago, in the crucible that was the 1960s, when movements and activism proliferated across the country and independent mediamaking was taking hold as a force for social change. From their home base in Chicago, Quinn and his colleagues found the stories that informed their mission. Over the next several decades, Quinn oversaw a trove of work that evolved from agitprop cinema to a rich canon of stories that reached wider audiences with their humanism and deep emotional resonance. Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters, The Trials of Muhammed Ali: These are
"We want to challenge our audience… and to surprise it," says Leena Pasanen, who took the helm as director of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film ( DOK Leipzig) earlier this year. Pasanen has introduced a fundamental change in thematic content of the world's oldest documentary film festival (it was founded in 1955) by doing away with the strict partitioning of documentary and animated films. In that sense, DOK Leipzig is one of the pioneer documentary film festivals in this format, which integrates animated documentaries in the Official Selection and qualifies
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 Point of View magazine, Svetla Turnin tries to go beyond the female gaze to move toward documentary gender equality: Documentary is a more democratic medium than fiction filmmaking. It has featured egalitarian production practices based on collaboration, trust, mutual aid and respectful equity—not just among