As documentary filmmaking has evolved, so too has POV, the influential and award-winning series on PBS that for the past 25 years has been a creative home to an eclectic group of independent filmmakers and their provocative films. As it celebrates its 25th anniversary, in addition to pure longevity, the longest running independent film series has also pioneered community engagement efforts and digital strategies that have expanded the impact and overall life of these films. "I often refer to POV's mission as developing an approach to the lifespan of the documentary," says Cynthia Lopez, co
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A report on the 14th annual Docaviv, the Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival
Seattle International Film Festival Draws 155,000.
Doc Talk Radio offers a unique opportunity for documentarians to get the word out about their films. The program, co-hosted by DJs Arne Johnson and Shane King on 87.9 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area, is the only radio show that exclusively focuses on the documentary filmmaking community and its stories. The show explores the filmmaking process and the subjects of particular projects, and features both local filmmakers and those who are passing through the Bay Area for festivals, shoots and screenings. According to Johnson, the show grew organically out of his and King's own filmmaking efforts
What is a pioneer? We generally think of pioneers as explorers, innovators, trailblazers. People who open up new possibilities, new ways of thinking, seeing and doing. When Mel Stuart lit out for the media-making territory some 50 years ago, television had just begun to insinuate itself as an artistic medium that provided young filmmakers like Stuart with the opportunity to become pioneers. Stuart's first artistic impulse lay not in the media arts, however, but in music, a discipline he followed while a student at Columbia University and New York University. He may have abandoned music as a
Nearly a hundred years ago, William Allen White, the iconic writer and spokesperson for small-town America, wrote, "If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, or joys, or base temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own... how much kinder, how much gentler he would be." Audiences emotionally connect with films when they discover they share with the "characters" the common thread of humanity. This goes for both nonfiction and narrative films. One doesn't have to be a Latina in America to relate to the pressures of family and society
Festival tickets are available until June 8, 2012.
A review of 'D.A. Pennebaker,' by Keith Beattie.
This festival runs June 6-10 at the Egyptian Theater in LA.