Dear IDA Community: As many readers of Documentary magazine may have already heard, I left IDA at the end of 2014 to accept a new position with the American Film Institute as the Director of AFI Docs, the Institute’s documentary film festival in Washington, DC. I’m looking forward to building on AFI Docs’ outstanding 13-year history to create a world-class showcase for documentary films in one of the world’s most important cities. But as I look back on six wonderful and productive years at the IDA, it isn’t easy to say goodbye. I’ve had the good fortune to work closely with the IDA’s dedicated
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Filmmaker Ross Kauffman has worked in the film industry for more than two decades. His directing credits include the Academy Award-winning Born Into Brothels and, more recently, E-Team (along with Katy Chevigny), which was acquired at Sundance 2014 by Netflix and is currently streaming there. He is also a top documentary cinematographer, and his work has taken him to such war-torn areas as Syria, Libya and Kashmir. As part of IDA's GETTING REAL conference, Kauffman participated in sessions that focused on the documentary career and on ethics. We caught up with him by phone and email for a
Dear Readers, You can call this issue GETTING REAL: The Sequel. Or, Beyond GETTING REAL. But we felt strongly that a groundbreaking conference—for the IDA, at least—deserved a follow-up assessment here. So, we solicited a cross-section of our participants to not just give us a rundown of takeaways, but to go deeper and come back to us with a longer view of, say, Now that we've gathered as a community to really get into the most pressing and prominent issues, where do we go from here? In the wake of this deep, three-day exploration of Art, Career and Impact, what does this mean for the
Robert Kenner's stylish new documentary, Merchants of Doubt, is many things: an exposé of climate change debunkers; a clinical analysis of how cigarette companies hid the truth of their cancer-producing product for decades; and a searing indictment of how popular media operates, allowing untrustworthy people to appear on high-profile TV and radio shows as experts. Given all of these important topics, the choice of opening the film with a colorful treatment of how magician Jamy Ian Swiss plies his craft seems surprising—but not to Kenner. "This is a film about deceit and deception, so along the
This year’s GETTING REAL conference fell at an introspective and ripe time in my life as a documentary filmmaker. For most of my career, I have felt decidedly on the outside looking in at those special folks who visit war zones, interview presidents, whistle-blowers and celebrities, get the big grants and commercial work, and generally manage to make a living at filmmaking. I have envied those who, as Sundance Documentary Film Program Director Tabitha Jackson describes it, are "Curators of Outrage." Especially during my hiatus for motherhood, I was a complete outsider—in a world of diapers
I love hanging out with other documentary filmmakers. It's way cheaper than therapy! Because let's "#GetReal": It's hard out here, y'all! But it's also an amazing time for nonfiction filmmakers. So hanging out at the GETTING REAL 2014 conference was a great way to re-charge and get inspired. It was a welcome break from the grind of raising money, researching the kaleidoscopic distribution landscape and arguing with my tween daughter that Nicki Minaj offers no redeeming cultural value whatsoever. One thing stood out to me after seeing everyone together: There are a lot of people making
Myth #1. Filmmakers who tackle exposés of human rights abuses, or illuminate social issues, are not artists. We are. We give equal weight to being artists as well as human rights defenders. We know that as we get better and better as artists, we create wider audiences with far greater impact. Because we aren’t just developing a narrative story arc, we are developing ideas across the length and breadth of the documentary film. It’s the interplay of the two that creates dramatic tension. The power and beauty of cinema are our artistic and political tools. Our canvas is global; our palette, the
Last spring, Al Jazeera America announced a partnership with Chicago-based Kartemquin Films ( The Interrupters, The New Americans) on a six-part documentary series that will explore the hopes, fears and realities of low-wage American workers. The result, Hard Earned, slated to air beginning May 3, looks at the lives of five struggling families, representing a diversity of races, ages, industries and regions. Al Jazeera America began conversations with Kartemquin early on—even before the channel’s launch in August 2013—on how to make an impact with stories that dig deep below the surface of
Bruce Sinofsky, who with Joe Berlinger made the celebrated Paradise Lost trilogy along with Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and Brother's Keeper, passed away this morning after a longtime struggle with diabetes. He was 58 years old. Joe Berlinger contacted us with the news via email, and offered the following tribute: "Bruce encouraged both of us to throw caution into the wind to start capturing what would become Brother’s Keeper in 1991 with no money in our pockets, in the pre-video 16mm age of documentary-making, when making a no-budget film took a little more ingenuity to get in the can
"In the 21st century, people will recognize and realize that there is a man who in 20 years created a body of work that will stand the test of time: Ten plays that documented the African-American experience in the 20th century. No other playwright in the American canon has done that." Sam Pollard, the Peabody, Emmy and IDA Award-winning editor/director/producer ( Four Little Girls, Slavery by Another Name), is referring to August Wilson, the subject of the forthcoming American Masters documentary August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand. Pollard got a call from WQED Executive Producer Darryl