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! TV critic Hank Stuever of the Washington Post on the pitfalls of making a wonkumentary: Too many times, the film that promises the fullest and most exclusive warts-and-all portrait turns out to be little more than the equivalent of a polite Wikipedia entry. Showtime’s anticlimactic 2013 film about Dick Cheney
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Justine Nagan is the new executive director of American Documentary, Inc. and executive producer of PBS's POV series. She comes to PBS from Kartemquin Films in Chicago, where she served as executive director and executive producer for the past nine years. Justine's passion for documentary goes back to her college years, when she worked in public television and at the Wisconsin Film Festival, where she was first introduced to Kartemquin's films. Some years later she had the opportunity to volunteer at Kartemquin, eventually going on to direct her own feature ( Typeface) and short ( Sacred
The Camden International Film Festival (CIFF), which ran September 17-20 in Camden, Maine, was launched a decade ago as a realized dream of founder/executive director Ben Fowlie, a Camden native and a graduate of the Emerson College Film School. First tapping into old Maine money and the rich Boston documentary community four hours to the south, Fowlie has since built a vital documentary showcase that has risen to prominence as must-stop destination on the nonfiction festival circuit. In a month opening with the Toronto/Venice/Telluride triumvirate and concluding with the IFP Market and 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! IndieWire’s Phillip Lopate interviews artist Laurie Anderson about her new documentary Heart of a Dog: “All of my work is always flowing between about four things: the music, the text, the structure, the images. This film could have been called a few other things. It could have been called How to Feel Sad without
Matt Radecki and Doug Blush will be the lead presenters at IDA's first Tech Day event on the evening of October 27 at the AFI Mark Goodson Screening Room in Los Angeles. For more information: documentary.org/tech-days Documentaries often take a very long time to complete—much longer than the typical narrative film. The recently released Finders Keepers, for instance, took seven years. Same for Hoop Dreams. It took two years just to edit the classic Grey Gardens. The sheer length of time required to make a documentary puts a premium on workflow. Get it right and you’ll wind up with a movie in
To understand the technical genius of film editors, tune in to The Food Channel and take a look at the competition reality show Chopped. It seems entirely unrelated, but really, the parallels of this program to the methodologies of film editors are similar, if not uncanny. It’s a helpful analogy in explaining the technical mastery of these artists. First, Chopped takes several chefs, hands them a basket of very distinct and limited ingredients, and instructs them to prepare a meal using those items only. Some chefs are ill-prepared and caught off-guard. In a Darwinian sense, they’re eliminated
Before he made Cartel Land, director/cinematographer Matthew Heineman had never shot in a conflict zone. His work had focused mainly on US domestic issues in such films as Our Time and Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare. He’d been shooting in Arizona, documenting the self-appointed guardians of the US-Mexico border, and after four months, he began to hear about vigilantes in Michoacán, Mexico, fighting for their lives and for protection against a corrupt government and the drug cartels that have all but decimated modern Mexico. “I've never been in a place where bullets were
Cinematographers Joan Churchill, ASC ( Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer), Kirsten Johnson ( CitizenFour) and Buddy Squires, ASC ( The Central Park Five), share a collective set of core goals and values for filmmaking. Their job is to serve the director’s vision by getting at the center of the story the director wants to tell. They do this by establishing an empathetic, trusting relationship with the subject. Making technical choices on style, size or type of camera, camera lens and lighting based on the story are only part of the job. Churchill, Johnson and Squires approach these
For filmmakers, drone cameras are a tool with potential to shape the work—or even define it—with breathtaking footage from surprising physical locations. But drone operators face material and legal risks, and the learning curve to proficient operation is steep. Jay Ward Brown, a former public affairs programming producer at PBS, is an attorney with the Washington, DC law firm Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, LLP. His practice is devoted to media and entertainment clients, and he happens to own a drone. He explains that operating the machine is harder than it looks, and getting it right requires
Engaging with Reality: Documentary and Globalization By Ib Bondebjerg Intellect/Chicago University Press $28.50, 288 pps. ISBN: 978-1-78320-189-1 In his book Engaging with Reality: Documentary and Globalization, Ib Bondebjerg, professor of film and media studies at University of Copenhagen, offers us a fresh perspective on the role of documentary in society, the broader issues of globalization, and how these documentaries engage in global challenges. Bondebjerg’s inspiration for the book came from Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s 2006 documentary The Secret War, a critical investigation into the