As you may have read last week, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission has provided a generous grant enabling the IDA to recruit two promising undergraduate students for paid summer 2014 internships. During their time with us, these two bright individuals will gain expertise in event and educational program management. Corinne Gaston has joined us this week as the new Conference and Educational Programs Intern. Corinne has one more semester to finish at the University of Southern California where she studies Creative Writing, Folklore, and Screenwriting. Originally from Pennsylvania, Corinne
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Judging from the films on display at the Maryland Film Festival, we are having a bit of an existential crisis in our film culture, which likely reflects trends that will ripple through our culture at large in the near future. In terms of form and theme, every film that I saw raised serious questions about not only how we define the real, but also about how we communicate about it. In a world in which we are flooded with both hyper-produced and seemingly instantaneous images, it's hard to grasp the meaning of authenticity. Humans are wired to find patterns. When we don't have them we often feel
The Roxie Cinema sits in the heart of San Francisco's hip/grungy Mission District, footsteps away from trendy pubs, the city's best burrito (the real San Francisco treat, according to Calvin Trillin) and one of its busiest drug corners. Like the neighborhood, the Roxie has survived by being spunky, taking risks with its programming and, in a rare venture for a small exhibition house, moving into distribution. Since 1984 Roxie Releasing ( www.roxiereleasing.com) has circulated more than two dozen films, including a slate of documentaries that have been praised ( Rivers and Tides, Genghis Blues
by Joseph E. Miller and Barbara Leigh Gregson Robert Guenette, Emmy Award-winning writer, producer and director who produced documentaries for CBS, NBC, ABC, HBO, PBS and Showtime, passed away on October 31, 2003, after a two-year battle with cancer. He was 68. Guenette, one of the IDA's co-founders and the first recipient of the IDA's Pioneer Award, was fond of saying that documentarians' work "mustn't end with making films about social causes. They must live social causes and answer the call for social service with the same passion and commitment that they bring to their films." It was a
A review of Bill Nichols' 'Introduction to Documentary.'
In My Father's House is a fascinating film because filmmaker Fatima Jebli Ouazzani shows us all her confusions, dreams and regrets, while remaining clear about the life from which she ran away. She had left her family as a young girl to avoid sharing the same fate as her mother and grandmother, who both had been married against their will and, although they struggled desperately, were powerless to change the plans that had been made for them. Fatima's film is a meditation on her life as she returns to her family in Morocco after 16 years' absence. Normally, I don't like dramatic inserts in
The Los Angeles County Arts Commission has provided a generous grant enabling the IDA to recruit two promising undergraduate students for paid summer 2014 internships. During their time with us, these two bright individuals will gain expertise in event and educational program management. The first to join the fold is Niala Charles, our new Program and Events Intern. Niala will be embarking on her senior year at Pepperdine University in the Fall, where she is studying Broadcast Journalism and Economics. Hailing from Temecula, California, Niala has traveled extensively throughout the UK and
This week the world commemorates the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings on the Normandy beaches, but audiences at this year's Cannes Film Festival have already been immersed in reflections on war. So many films in and out of competition dropped us onto the battlefields and frontlines of Syria, Chechnya, Ukraine, Iraq, Russia, Mali, Sarajevo, Ivory Coast and Burkino Faso. The French newspaper Le Monde referred to the 67th edition of the festival as "Le Grand débarquement." The festival's tone, mood and atmosphere felt different this year: the world projected on the screen inside the Palais
Midway through Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol, I was sitting on the edge of my seat. My chin was in my hand and my mouth was slightly open. Also, I actually realized it. There was a moment during the film when I consciously thought, "How did I get in this position?" This film had hypnotized me. That was SilverDocs 2010. I was privileged enough to be at the film festival just to watch films. I spent a lot of that year going to festivals to study and prepare to cut my first feature doc. I'd been to school for documentary and I had the support of the university where I teach production. I was in a
IDA sponsor and generous supporter of the documentary film community, FirstCom Music, has something new for documentary filmmakers - the BBC Orchestral Toolkit! Exclusively from FirstCom Music, the BBC Orchestral Toolkit is a new editing option that's for documentary score alternatives and beyond. It's an exciting scoring tool that is not delivering "stems" but something much more flexible and easier to use in many ways. Filmmakers can easily build a custom music score with a simple drag and drop of the audio files from the toolkit directly into your editing software alongside your visual edit