Unfolding in chapters, Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect records both an emotional, very personal search and an authoritative biopic. The subject: the filmmaker's own father, the renowned Philadelphia-based architect, Louis I. Kahn. Although the elder Kahn completed only a relatively limited number of commissions in his career, his legacy and influence still resonate today throughout the architectural world. Most will recognize his timeless building for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, while his Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, New Hampshire, and Yale
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A review of Jeffrey Ruoff's 'Coming Soon to to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals'
Film festivals are arguably the most important springboards for documentaries. It is of paramount importance to make the most of not only your film's introduction to the world but also your complete festival experience. The only way to start this process is by asking the ever-important question: "What do I want to get out of this experience?" The answer may be, to find a distributor, make a sale or generate publicity for a theatrical run. The trick is to use all available elements to get what you want from a festival premiere. One of the most acclaimed documentaries of 2002, Standing in the
Film Society of Lincoln Center launches a new series.
Here is the latest installation of great funding opportunities coming up this summer. There is money to be had. Go for it! IDFA BERTHA FUNDThe IDFA Bertha Fund is the only fund in the world dedicated solely to stimulating and empowering the creative documentary sector in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe. The fund is looking for new creative documentary projects which can be submitted in project development, production, and post production. Deadline: May 15th, 2014 SHAW MEDIA-HOT DOCS FUNDSEstablished in April 2008, the Shaw Media-Hot Docs Funds consist
This is the best and worst of times for social documentarians. Never has it been easier or cheaper to make a social documentary than today. Many a film professional will grumble, though, that it's still pretty hard to make a watchable one. No matter how cheap it gets to capture images and edit them on your own computer, a social documentary is an artform, and it requires the powerful storytelling skills that are at the base of that artform. It also requires the expert skills of craftspeople ranging from cinematography to lighting to digital effects to editing. It is also hard—and, some say
After more than a year on the film festival circuit, the directors of We Always Lie to Strangers finally brought their feature-length documentary about Branson, Missouri to its de facto hometown. The Branson premiere, April 27, was a homecoming of sorts for co-directors David Wilson and AJ Schnack. The two made their first filmmaking trip to the small Ozark town in November 2007. Five years later, they returned to screen their rough cut for the four families featured in the film, all performers in the live music shows that dominate the Branson strip, often called the Las Vegas of the Ozarks.
"What was so unusual for the Women's Movement and filmmakers like myself," says Liane Brandon, recalling a period when both were just starting out, "was that the lives of ordinary women had not been the subject of documentary films. When I asked distributors why, I was told, 'Who cares?'" But Brandon did care. A founding member of New Day Films, the New York-based collective of social-issue media makers and distributors, she made her first important film about sex-role stereotyping, Sometimes I Wonder Who I Am, in 1970, and followed it with Anything You Want to Be (1971), Betty Tells Her Story
Japanese Documentary Film:The Meiji Era through Hiroshima By Abe Mark Nornes University of Minnesota Press 257 pps. (paperbound) $19.95 ISBN 0-8166-4046-7 Abe Mark Nornes came to write about Japanese documentary through a circuitous route. Asked, along with Fukushima Yukio, to program a retrospective called Nichi-Bei Eigasen (Japan/America Film Wars) for the 1991 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Nornes was charged with showing American and Japanese World War II-era documentaries that covered the same themes and subjects. "We showed an American film and a Japanese film on a