Ayuko Babu's passion for international cinema began when he was 13 years old. On the way home from playing basketball one summer with friends in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the future founder and executive director of the Los Angeles-based Pan African Film & Arts Festival (PAFF) noticed how several people of color were queued up outside a local art house to see a movie. He and his friends thought the film must be important to attract such an audience, so they, too, wanted to see it. The film was in a language that they couldn't understand, the cast was full of people of color, the costumes were
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Ross Greenburg is a native New Yorker whose boyhood heroes included such sports icons as Joe Namath, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali. As a boy, Greenburg was a fan and an athlete. He played school football with his friend Kyle Gifford, whose father was Frank Gifford, a legendary football player who became a sports commentator for ABC Television. That connection provided opportunities for Greenburg to freelance as a production assistant with ABC Sports while he was still a student at Brown University. "Sports was in my soul," Greenburg says. "ABC Sports didn't have a job
'Facing Fear' screens March 1 at 9:00 a.m. at IDA's DocuDay.
'Prison Terminal' screens March 1 at 9:00 a.m. at IDA's DocuDay.
'The Missing Picture' screens February 20 as part of IDA's The Art of Documentary screening series.
Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of music documentaries finding their way to both the big and small screens. Making one is in many ways not so different from making any other type of documentary, but there is something about music, and the films about it, that offer both unique challenges and rewards. One challenge is as basic as defining what a music documentary is. One might subdivide the genre into two categories. The concert/performance film—for which Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock (1970) is the basic template—may incorporate some interstitial sequences, but it's primarily
The panel "Music—The Forgotten Character in Documentary Storytelling," which took place at the Filmmaker Lodge during the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, came out of the work the Sundance Institute is doing with the Documentary Film Composers Lab. Established in 2003 as an outgrowth of the Feature Film Composers Lab, the lab brings together filmmakers and composers to work on music for documentary. This year, filmmaker Vikram Jayanti and composer Miriam Cutler were advisors at the lab and participated on the panel, along with filmmakers Jessica Yu, Catherine Tambini, Carlos Sandoval and composers
Documentary filmmakers have been blowing smoke—figuratively and sometimes literally—right from the beginning. For their 1898 re-creation of the Battle of Santiago Bay, J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith employed a tub of water, toy boats, sparklers and cigar and cigarette smoke, which was blown across the battle scene by Mrs. Blackton standing just off-camera. Robert Flaherty propelled documentaries into the popular imagination with Nanook of the North (1922) and has been blasted for his dramatic manipulations ever since. (Filmmaker Emile de Antonio once said of Flaherty's idealized hero,
AUTHOR'S NOTE: It is with a heavy heart that we announce Alice Herz Sommer's passing at the age of 110 on Sunday, February 23, 2014. My interview with director Malcolm Clarke was conducted on Tuesday, February 4, 2014. Alice was in good health and knew about the film's nomination for Oscar®. At 109, Alice Herz Sommer is the world's oldest pianist…and its oldest Holocaust survivor. At the heart of her remarkable story of courage and endurance is her passion for music. We spoke to director Malcolm Clarke over the phone about the making of his Academy Award-nominated documentary short, The Lady
Earlier this year, Cobalt Entertainment Technology, a Los Angeles-based firm that specializes in three-dimensional filmed entertainment, teamed up with NFL Films, which produces documentaries, feature films, television programs and commercial and corporate productions on behalf of the National Football League, to introduce a digital 3-D camera system called 3ality. Cobalt and NFL Films test-drove this system during the recent NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl, with the intent of producing a feature-length, 3-D IMAX documentary about the 2004 season. Documentary talked to Cobalt CEO Steve