Two Filmmaking Teams Discuss Their Salutes to the Stars of Early Soul and R&B
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Dear IDA Members, I am happy to report on the successes of the Oscars Reception and DocuDay—and want to congratulate the Academy Award winners: Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Bill Guttentag and Robert David Port's Twin Towers. In 1982, after Nigel Noble accepted the Academy Award for best short documentary, he was ignored by the media, which chose to interview his celebrity presenters instead. So, in the spirit of the IDA's mission, the Oscars Reception and DocuDay, were born. This is a far different world than it was 20 years ago. As this country wages a war that most of us did not
As a documentary producer/director for almost two decades, I have had the opportunity to experience first-hand the meteoric evolution of technology over that time, and the commensurate changes in the process of making documentaries. But as much as things changed in the past two decades, over only the past few years a whole new spate of technological advances have once again completely revolutionized the documentary process––in some cases, in ways we never could have imagined. In the spring of 2001, I was asked by the History Channel to produce a rather ambitious four-part documentary series
With a $1,000 entry ticket, RealScreen Summit—the annual international conference on "the business of factual programming," held in February in Washington, DC—is an event that most independent documentary filmmakers will have to evaluate carefully before committing their credit cards. Why do they come? Veteran producer Jennifer Lawson comes in order to "affirm my understanding of the marketplace"—to get a reality check and to pick up news. Ben Phelan of Denver Center Media, which produces programs oriented to the public TV market, comes to pitch. "It's convenient," he says. "You can have all
The Academy Award is widely regarded as the ultimate achievement in filmmaking. In the case of the documentary categories, winning can catapult a film and filmmaker from relative obscurity to worldwide renown literally overnight. Yet, for all the hoopla surrounding the Academy Awards, is a filmmaker's career really altered by joining the ranks of the chosen few to receive an Oscar? We checked in with last year's winners to see how their lives had changed one year later. Director Jean Xavier de Lestrade and producer Denis Poncet, whose Murder on a Sunday Morning won the award for Best
And the winners are...'Bowling for Columbine' and 'Twin Towers.'
Oliver Stone's films have been lighting rods for controversy, particularly when he's fictionalized real events (consider the responses to Salvador, JFK and Nixon). In May, HBO will air the three-time Academy Award winner's first documentary, Comandante, a person-to-person encounter between Stone and Cuba's head-of-state, Fidel Castro. His aim was to demystify Castro, to go behind the caricature of cigar, beard and military fatigues. Because Stone is not overtly antagonistic here and does not condemn Castro, expect a strong reaction—perhaps even outrage—from Cuban exiles. For the past 44 years
The Big Apple's crowded festival scene has had room for the New York Exposition of Short Film and Video ( www.nyexpo.org) for 36 years, making it the nation's oldest showcase of independent short films. The energetic and always resourceful festival director Anne Borin shifted venues last December from the usual university setting to a theatrical outlet, Manhattan's Cinema Village, where more films could be screened and programs repeated. There were 96 works this year, including 27 documentaries. NYExpo prides itself on documentary shorts from around the globe in a generous mix of the socially
For the last three years, a highlight for documentarians at the Sundance Film Festival has been the House of Docs, a community space designed to increase awareness of documentary film and to provide support to documentary filmmakers through roundtable discussions, special presentations, one-on-one meetings and informal chats. This year, the House expanded to incorporate a Filmmaker Lodge, open to all festival filmmakers. According to Dianne Weyermann, the director of the Sundance Institute Documentary Program, "This year, we made the decision to create a space which would embrace all
The 2003 Sundance Film Festival opened with a number of palpable changes: longtime festival co-director and documentary impresario Nicole Guillemet departed last year to head the Miami International Film Festival; the House of Docs moved up Main Street, sharing quarters at the Elks Lodge with the Filmmakers Lodge; the Holiday Cinemas reopened this year for doc screenings in spacious and expanded quarters; and Sundance itself relocated its headquarters from Shadow Ridge to the Marriott near Prospector Square. While Sundance ‘02 exuded a post-September 11 malaise, with Park City's skiers