Night and Fog: A Film in History By Sylvie Lindeperg Translated from the French by Tom Mesv Visible Evidence, Volume 28 University of Minnesota Press, 20140 No subject in history has received as much examination for its visible evidence as the Nazi concentration and death camps, and no documentary about the camps has created as much controversy as Night and Fog (1956), directed by Alan Resnais. I write "directed by," rather than "a film by," because after reading Night and Fog: A Film in History by Sylvie Lindeperg, I realize that this seminal film is the product of many, sometimes warring
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There has never been a more dangerous time for documentary filmmakers. Many work independently without organizational backing and are literally on the frontlines, taking on challenging situations, often without the protections that journalists doing similar work have in place. Taking on financial, physical, legal and technological risks, the documentary filmmaker often fights the lone battle, whether in a war zone, or against government, powerful corporations or individuals. In a report released this past winter by the Center for Media and Social Impact, titled Dangerous Documentaries
Editor's note: Over the next few weeks, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the films that have been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an Oscar® nomination in the documentary category. You can see Cartel Land on Saturday, February 27 at DocuDay, the IDA's daylong celebration with back-to-back screenings of the nominees at the Writers Guild of America Theater. This article was first published in July, 2015. The drug wars among the handful of cartels in Mexico over the past decade have cost tens of thousands of lives, as the nation south of the border
Editor's note: Over the next few weeks, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the films that have been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an Oscar® nomination in the documentary category. You can see The Look of Silence on Saturday, February 27 at DocuDay, the IDA's daylong celebration with back-to-back screenings of the nominees at the Writers Guild of America Theater. This article was first published in the Summer 2015 issue of Documentary magazine. With the North American theatrical release of Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence coming up this
With the premiere event in our new Conversation Series just one week away, we're getting excited about the stellar lineup of seasoned documentary filmmakers we've hand-picked to bring to the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood over the next few months. The Series, which kicks off on the evening of Tuesday, July 21 with Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering ( The Hunting Ground, The Invisible War), will be hosted by Ben Mankiewicz, whose turns on Turner Classic Movies and What the Flick?! have afforded him the opportunity to interact with the art and culture of movies on an almost daily basis. We wanted to
For women interested in pursuing a career in directing, the opportunities for gigs in commercial filmmaking in America have never been great. But the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent indictment of the entertainment industry for its unfair and biased hiring practices was an unprecedented move, uprooting the conversation from the small realm of feminist film bloggers and planting it into major conversations in mainstream media outlets. Hollywood and its studios have since been taken to task for their egregious oversights, and it’s been a banner year in the movement toward equality in the
One of the programmatic strengths of the Los Angeles Film Festival is its propensity to find and show compelling—and often little known—stories about LA. Some of these stories happened long ago; some are happening right now, unbeknownst to many of us. In a perpetually jam-packed festival landscape, and in a month in which LAFF goes up against Sheffield Doc/Fest, AFI Docs, BAMCinemafest, Provincetown International Film Festival and Banff World Media Festival, with the Edinburgh Film Festival and Sunny Side of the Doc coming at the end of the month, the Los Angeles Fest held its own: Of the 23
"Why isn't FRONTLINE more like Minecraft?" In her keynote address to the AFI DOCS Filmmaker Conference, FRONTLINE executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath relayed her 9-year-old son’s question posed at an MIT Open Docs Media Lab event. (For the uninitiated, Minecraft, the virtual reality creation game, is the hottest activity around for the most native of digital-natives, the pre-tween iPad generation.) Aronson-Rath spoke of being inspired at her week-long immersion into nonlinear storytelling ideation at MIT, and the importance of paying attention to the Minecraft question—and a Minecraft
Editor's note: Over the next few weeks, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the films that have been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an Oscar® nomination in the documentary category. You can see What Happened, Miss Simone? on Saturday, February 27 at the Writers Guild of America Theater as a part of DocuDay. Liz Garbus first burst onto the documentary scene in 1998 the way all documentary filmmakers dream of. The Farm: Angola USA, which she directed and produced with Jonathan Stack, earned the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, Best Documentary honors from
3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, which documents the 2012 murder of an unarmed African-American teenager at the hands of a middle-aged white man at a Jacksonville gas station, is a tightly crafted courtroom drama that deals with the idea of storytelling as much as it does with the idea of race. In fact, the issue of race was not mentioned in the trial because the murder was not being considered as a hate crime. The narrative in the courtroom was that the accused, Michael Dunn, was acting in self-defense because he thought he saw a gun. This was a story that his counsel presented, to great effect