"Ahoy, hornswaggling pirates! Get me film booty out of yer bung hole or you'll sleep in Davy Jones' Locker." That's about the best threat most independent filmmakers think they can make against illegal film pirates. I have just finished my monthly task of Googling myself, and have found over 11 million hits. Okay, 13,000 hits for me, 11 million for my documentary See What I'm Saying: The Deaf Entertainers Documentary. This is not ego-surfing or a vanity search, but rather a seek-and-destroy missive for my distributor to send cease-and-desist letters to the dozens of illegal torrent files
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Decoding Deepak is set to play IFFLA on Thursday, April 12th at 8:30pm
CHAINSAW, an ongoing supporter of the documentary film community, joins as a Contributing Sponsor of the 16th Annual DocuWeeks Theatrical Showcase. CHAINSAW is the first sponsor confirmed for our annual theatrical showcase of some of the year's best docs from around the world. We welcome them again as we did in 2011. Thank you CHAINSAW for being so awesome and for all that you do for documentary filmmakers! CHAINSAW, based in Hollywood, CA, provides creative editorial and post finishing services from concept to completion. Emmy Award winning editors Bill DeRonde and Mike Polito used their
We spoke with Eddie Schmidt as he handed the IDA Board President torch over to Marjan Safinia.
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Academy Film Archive The International Documentary Association is recognizing the extraordinary contribution that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Academy Film Archive has made to preserving historic documentaries for posterity. About 70,000 historic motion pictures are archived at the academy's Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in Hollywood, California. Michael Pogorzelski, Academy Film Archive director, estimates that about 5,000 of those titles are documentaries, including the IDA collection. "It's hard to pin down the
Amidst the announcement of the line-up of the 58th Cannes Film Festival, Thierry Frémaux, the event's artistic director, used ambiguous language to address the fact that no documentary films had been selected to compete for its coveted awards. "This year, we are under the sign of cinema d'auteur," Frémaux explained, "Whereas in 2004, we were under the sign of eclecticism." This was perhaps a polite way of stating that this year's competition roster was almost entirely comprised of films from such established narrative filmmakers as Gus Van Sant, Lars von Trier and David Cronenberg. It goes
A detailed recap of our recent all-business event in Los Angeles, complete with photos!
Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker, 2005 IDA Career Achievement Award honorees Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall... There are some partnerships where it's difficult to consider one without the other, so indelible are their entwined identities. The same is true of filmmakers DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, whose 30-year collaboration has yielded many award-winning documentaries and advanced the cinéma vérité filmmaking style to capture historical moments and movements in music, entertainment and politics. "I sort of feel like making films is like trying to have children in that you desperately