The Independent Film Producer's Survival Guide A Business and Legal Sourcebook By Gunnar Erickson, Harris Tulchin and Mark Halloran
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Shola Lynch talks about not wanting to be pigeonholed as the black female filmmaker who only tells stories about black women.
The Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) celebrated its 30th anniversary with some 33 docs in the Refracting Reality section, 13 of them earmarked for the documentary competition. It was a wild opening weekend in the Emerald City in late May, with the unveiling of the new Seattle Central Library, conceived and executed by Rem Koolhaus to universal acclaim, happening right next door to SIFF headquarters. This was the first SIFF in quite a while without founding director/impresario Daryl Macdonald, who returned last year to another festival he helped found: the Palm Springs International
For the documentary community, the big news from the 2004 Cannes International Film Festival this past May would seem to be Michael Moore, right? The story of Fahrenheit 9/11 and the desperate race to find distribution was the lead story in the trades almost every day of the festival. The press hounded Moore as though he were the hottest pop star on earth. And to have this documentary win the Palm d'Or on top of all that... Well, this story must be the big news from Cannes, right? Wrong. The significant story from Cannes for the documentary community is the acceptance—across the board—of
For anyone who grew up in Canada in the 1960s and '70s, watching documentaries used to mean sitting in a darkened social studies class, while some National Film Board reel spooled you into deep slumber with the regular rhythm of the projector and the drone of a wheezy narrator. Thirty years on, however, I found myself lining up around the block on a spectacular Vancouver summer night for opening weekend of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Coming in at the number one spot for North America's opening weekend grosses, Moore's latest film has helped create another watershed moment in the history
Slowly the signs are going up. I saw the first one a few weeks ago. It said, "Due to new security regulations, there is no use of camcorders or cameraphones at this location." I was getting my driver's license renewed at DMV. The signs are at tunnels, bridges, nightclubs, the Subway. Lots of places that were thought of as "public" in past years. Somehow, using a video camera to record The Strip in Las Vegas can be construed as a terrorist surveillance. While these concerns are understandable, the result is a direct threat to what we all do. If observing the world is "documenting," and
Courtesy of Roadside Attractions While shooting my documentary Kings Point, I once said to a subject,"Just try to pretend I'm not here." Her response taught me a lot: "How can I pretend you're not here? You're here!" It's hard to imagine Sarah Polley, whose remarkable film Stories We Tell was released in May, ever asking the participants in her film to "pretend" she wasn't there. Her film, a complex tale of family secrets and the relationships between family members, inspires me because, in many ways, it defies the conventions—and the delusions—that documentary filmmakers traditionally revere
In the 1980s, with a global communications revolution raging in the cable television industry, everyone was keeping his or her eye on the year 1984. After all, who could forget the frightening vision of George Orwell's dystopian world so chillingly prophesized 35 years earlier: television screens in every home, with Big Brother's penetrating stare. But that same year, one media critic published an alternative and equally disturbing vision of our future based on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In his controversial treatise on "public discourse in the age of show business," Neil Postman
T3Media, Inc. and Discovery Communications Announce Expanded Short-Form Footage Licensing Deal Discovery Communications Iconic 25-Year Archive of High Quality HD Stock Footage Will Now Reach Larger Production Community via T3Media Global Library T3Media (formerly Thought Equity Motion), a leading provider of cloud-based video management and licensing services and generous sponsor of the International Documentary Association, announced an expanded agreement with Discovery Communications, the world’s number one nonfiction media company, to operate DiscoveryAccess.com, which houses more than 25
Filmmaker Richard Rowley talks about taking a man typically comfortable in the background and making him the star of his documentary.