Every president since Lyndon B. Johnson has made curing cancer a cornerstone of their health-care initiatives. With each passing administration, the claim that it can be conquered in a lifetime is made, only to evaporate as every advance in treatment is met by the ceaselessly morphing nature of the disease. Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, the three-part, six-hour documentary, executive produced by Ken Burns, directed and produced by Barak Goodman, and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, is a deeply engaging, often riveting account of the world’s
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Documentary magazine has been a constant at the IDA from the organization's humble beginnings in the early 1980s, when the magazine's page count was closer to that of a double-sided newsletter than a legitimate glossy publication. Thanks to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the IDA has started the process of archiving every issue of its stalwart publication to make each issue available online through the organization's website, documentary.org. Understanding that this would be a huge project, the IDA hired experienced journalist and documentary filmmaker Juliana Sakae
Last month, with the help of the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic and Donaldson + Callif LLP, the IDA filed a lengthy comment with the United States Copyright Office seeking an exemption to the DMCA’s prohibition on “ripping” from encrypted media, which makes it illegal to access encrypted material on DVDs, Blu-Ray, and just about any commercially available video source. The exemption we seek would allow filmmakers to “rip” media in these formats and from online media and cable TV for fair use purposes. The exemption is necessary because the DMCA is preventing us from
As we all know, documentaries are a labor of love—sometimes a long labor of a whole lotta love. And given the circumstances, some docs test our perseverance, commitment and dedication. There’s money to raise, there are forces majeures, and there’s the disruptive force of life itself that takes us out of the lives we’re documenting. We’re well familiar with the benchmarks: Hoop Dreams took seven years to make, Betrayal, 23. And the dearly departed Albert Maysles’ long-in-the-works train documentary will finally premiere this April, at the Tribeca Films Festival. And then there’s Denny Tedesco’s
Albert Maysles, who, with his cohorts at Drew Associates pioneered the cinema vérité style in the early 1960s that would make a lasting impact on the art and craft of documentary making, died Thursday, March 5. He was 88. Together with Robert Drew, Richard Leacock and DA Pennebaker, Maysles helped to liberate documentary cinema—and the documentary practice. Their 1960 film Primary brought you up close and personal with then-candidate John F. Kennedy as he campaigned across Wisconsin in his bid to win that state’s primary. The lighter weight cameras and synch sound, which Leacock and Pennebaker
While the Sundance Film Festival has earned its renown as a haven for discoveries and a launch pad for careers, its panels and discussions merit an equal dose of props for bringing together some of the best and brightest names in the business to chat in depth about issues and matters of concern to all of us. One of the more timely panels, "Bringing Truths to Light," assembled an all-star cast of Alex Gibney, at Sundance with Going Clear; Laura Poitras, in the midst of a stellar awards season with her film Citizenfour; Marc Silver, whose film 3 ½ Minutes received its world premiere at Sundance
From last year's GETTING REAL conference to Sundance's recent "Bringing Truths to Light" panel to the upcoming "Based on a True Story: The Intersections of Documentary Film and Journalism" three-day event held in conjunction with True/False, the issue of doc filmmakers and journalism has never been hotter. Our own Doc U panel "The Filmmaker as Journalist," held in San Francisco last month, weighed in with a fiery discussion of its own to confront the artistic and personal challenges of working in both the documentary and journalism spaces. The panel featured highly-regarded filmmakers Andrés
If it's a blustery and snowy January week in Washington, DC, then the annual Realscreen Summit must be in town. But the threat of a blizzard didn't stop nearly 2,700 people—the most ever—from attending the 17th edition, at the Washington Hilton. There were many hot topics to be found for the participants from 28 countries during the four-day event—from how to monetize programs, digital platforms and disruption, to new platforms available for content, to the nonfiction podcast sensation Serial. ( Serial was often cited as an old idea turned new that worked. Yes, people from the visual medium
Twelve years after making Spin (1995), the famous found-footage masterpiece created from pirated satellite feeds, Brian Springer released a dense, confounding feature documentary called The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity (2007). I didn’t hear about it then. I don’t think many people did. A few years later, a friend had a DVD-R of The Disappointment on top of his TV, in one of those piles of "things to watch" that tend to accumulate. I asked, "What’s this? I love Brian Springer!" He grimaced. "I don’t know, dude. I couldn’t get through it. You’re welcome to borrow it, but it
Filmmaker Les Blank, the recipient of the IDA’s 2011 Career Achievement Award, was nothing if not a man at peace with his obsessions. By turns a folklorist and historian of vanishing and forgotten Americana, Blank, through his films, shared many connective fascinations and motifs such as Cajun and Creole music and cuisine, the everyday restorative powers of garlic, reclusive blues musicians and wily auteur Werner Herzog. Blank’s always-alert 16mm camera displayed as much somber respect in observing a New Orleans jazz funeral as it effused unrestrained joy at peeking into a simmering pot of