There are eight million stories in the Naked City, it’s been said of New York—but none more extraordinary than the one filmmaker Crystal Moselle stumbled upon in 2010. Walking in the East Village one day, she encountered six young men—brothers, it turned out, with long black manes and bearing the names of Indian gods: Bhagavan, Govinda, Narayana, Mukunda, Krisna and Jagadesh. Moselle and the boys bonded over a mutual love of cinema and, as the friendship grew, Moselle gained admittance to their private world within the walls of a public housing project. The strange alternate universe she
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In 2001, when Tom Miller began making a film about gays and lesbians in relationships with partners from foreign countries, he would never have predicted how much Americans' position vis à vis same-sex marriage would change by the time he completed the film in 2014. It was a different world back then, recalls Miller. Miller left the medical profession in 1991 and moved to California to attend film school at USC; he received his masters in 1994. "I had come from Ohio," he recalls. "And I was totally in the closet and afraid to be out and gay. I came out while I was in film school, and then I
From a warts-and-all look at a Bay Area tech legend to a very personal meditation on life, love and history along one of the region's major highways, this year's San Francisco International Film Festival provided some memorable, only-in-San Francisco experiences as unique as the city itself. Steve Jobs: The Man and the Machine was the opening night film, one of the few times in the festival's 58-year history that a documentary was the kickoff attraction. But as many in the tech-heavy audience avidly played with their iPhones before the lights went down, it seemed fitting that Alex Gibney's
As I was putting together this quarter’s grants and opportunities blog post, I was made aware of an outstanding response posted in one of our favorite online communities, The D-Word. Lucky for us, the writer agreed to share her knowledge with the IDA community. We are pleased to feature the thoughtful insight of director/producer Tracy Heather Strain, as she shares her key takeaways about the NEH grant application process. She has applied and received two grants each from the NEA and NEH (!), with rejections from both as well, and served as a panelist for the organization three times since
GRANT DEADLINES LATINO PUBLIC BROADCASTING—PUBLIC MEDIA CONTENT FUNDThe Public Media Content Fund is an open invitation to independent producers to submit proposals for a program, limited series or short web-based digital video (no longer than 20 minutes, for distribution on PBS.org or another public media web platform) on any subject that relates to or is representative of Latino Americans that is appropriate for public television and/or one of its platforms. Up to 100K in funding for programs & 20K for new media. Deadline: June 1, 2015 PACIFIC PIONEER FUNDThe Pacific Pioneer Fund provides
This post originally appeared on NAMAC's website on May 19, 2015 Heather Dockray’s recent article on BrooklynBased.com ( Why Celebrate Brooklyn’s Paris is Burning Screening Sparked a Fire on Facebook) brings to light the controversy about an upcoming screening of documentary classic Paris Is Burning, by Jennie Livingston. The film, released in 1991, is about NYC Gay Ballroom culture in the 1980s and the trans/queer People of Color (TQPOC) who came of age and found their voices there amidst racism, poverty, homophobia and AIDS. BRIC, the event producers in Brooklyn, put together a group of all
This Wednesday, the IDA will be participating in a special Los Angeles hearing conducted by the United States Copyright Office in the next step of our advocacy for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Last November, this February, and earlier this month, we submitted comments seeking a rule that would allow filmmakers to bypass the encryption on DVDs, Blu-ray, and digitally transmitted video in order to make fair use in their films. Currently, the DMCA prevents filmmakers from accessing such material, even if we have the right to make fair use of it! To learn more about the
The Art of the Real series was launched in 2014, under the auspices of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with the objective of focusing more attention on formally adventurous documentaries. In its second edition, presented in April, co-curators Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes curated an intriguing slate of North American premieres and added two sidebars—"Repeat as Necessary: The Art of Reenactment" and "The Actualities of Agnès Varda." Lim and Rakes believe there is a need to feature this kind of work, given an environment, particularly in the US, where social issue documentary tends to
Just four days after the theatrical premiere of perhaps the most Gen X biodoc to ever grace the screens of your local multiplex, filmmaker Brett Morgen was still riding the high from Cobain: Montage of Heck's opening weekend success. So when Morgen told us he had the time to sit down with Sundance Film Festival's Trevor Groth to have a conversation about his career in front of members of the IDA community, we couldn't have been more thrilled. The filmmaker and Groth wove their way through Morgen's career, starting with his feature debut On the Ropes and moving through The Kid Stays in the
While the 22nd annual edition of Hot Docs, North America's largest documentary festival, screened over 200 films from April 23 to May 3 in Toronto, the Hot Docs Conference hosted 12 sessions and over 20 workshops for filmmakers. The theme of the conference was "bioDOCversity," which focused on "speakers who experiment with story and image, utilize enterprising approaches to distribution, bring together and build communities and more." Sessions weren't restricted to film or video documentaries; one focused on radio documentaries and another on using the videogame format to tell nonfiction