A week of pitching, hoping, hyping and selling came to a close as the 39th annual television program market, MIPTV, wrapped up in April and the 10,000 plus participants, from over 97 different countries, headed home. While buyers, sellers and producers came to Cannes with every conceivable type of television programming, the documentary form was clearly one of the favorites. You couldn’t walk down an aisle in the seaside convention center without being visually bombarded with colorful flyers announcing the availability of hundreds of wildlife, history, science, arts, lifestyle and current
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Donald Richie first arrived in Japan over 50 years ago, when he was hired to work as a typist for the Stars and Stripes American military newspaper. Richie informed the newspaper that they were lacking a film critic, and he was quickly appointed to the position. He recalls, “That’s when I first started being interested in Japanalia. I taught myself, through trying to teach members of the Occupation, what noh was, what kabuki was, what the tea ceremony was.” “I was much more interested in learning about Japanese films,” he continues. “So I would sneak into theaters, and not knowing the language
Dear IDA Members: I report from the Cannes Film Festival, which this year has to be the best I’ve ever attended. For the first time in 46 years, a documentary was in the main competition. Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine was the talk of the festival. Moore has outdone himself. He has never communicated more clearly and more directly about the social issues that are troubling him than in his new film. The massacre at Columbine High School is the launching pad for a discussion of gun control, our national violence—both on an individual domestic basis and as a matter of public policy—and our
The life of the documentary, we all hope, extends well beyond the final cut, festival circuit, theatrical run, television broadcast and nontheatrical distribution. Documentaries can, and do, have the power to change policies, attitudes, opinions—and lives. It takes a well-conceived strategy and a strong infrastructure of filmmakers, advisors, distributors and film subjects who are willing and able to take their documentaries to targeted audiences—wherever they may be—and generate discussion and dialogue. In this issue, we look at a few recent examples of projects that were conceived and
Picture this: A gregarious, glad-handing Irish pol finds himself in front of a skeptical class of well off, unsmiling high school students. Asked to define leadership, he stumbles for words. Never finished high school, he says. What about his past indictments, they ask. They were all dismissed—opponent's ploys, he says. Then he begins to tear up, describing his wife’s suicide, a consequence of his legal troubles. After he leaves, the kids let loose, and oblivious to the camera’s eventual audience, they mimic the class bias of their parents: “He looks like a crook.”…”Appeals to most little
I’ve been an IDA member for a fifteen years, sat on the board for nine of them, and served as president in 1996. Looking back at the documentary world during that time could give you a case of whiplash. One of the biggest changes since then is that digital video has become pervasive. Small cameras, affordable and unobtrusive, are making documentary filmmaking a possibility for those who rarely had access to making media in the past. I realized digital video was here to stay when I saw some of the pioneers of cinéma vérité—Bob Drew, Ricky Leacock, Al Maysles and DA Pennebaker among them—fall in
Before I was a particularly seasoned documentary viewer, I had an epiphany. At the time, I thought it was about documentary in particular, but now I realize it’s about extraordinary filmmaking in general. It is an idea that informs my own filmmaking, and is a standard by which I judge others. It came about 30 minutes into Errol Morris’ superb film, Gates of Heaven. Upon watching this five-minute scene in the film, I realized that while great documentaries usually purport to be about something specific, they are often about something very different than their narrative pretext. Nominally, Gates
Dear IDA Members; When we last left off, we reported on the fact that Discovery Communications planned to eliminate artistic credits on broadcasts of newly commissioned documentaries, except for a five-second card at the end of the program; the credits would be listed on a Discovery website instead. Well, I am happy to report that Discovery has listened to the concerns of the documentary community. As we were going to press last month, Discovery announced that it would give producers two alternatives—end-credits as they currently exist, or a new credit plan, consisting of front-end credits
DearReaders, William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past” to underscore the ineluctability of history and the looming presence of the past. We might arguably say the same about our art form—how we capture what unfolds before us, how we turn that raw material into a story, then history, and how we can keep it all alive for future generations to behold. The Young and the Dead, the new film by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini that premieres on HBO on May 12, profiles the Hollywood Forever Cemetary, where an enterprising young team of cemeterians has fashioned a
Dear Readers, Monthly publications such as ours are often encumbered by long lead times, and late breaking news can wreak havoc on the production schedule—and the editorial calendar. But sometimes news flashes and long-in-the-pipeline articles can strike a magical confluence, as with this issue, in which we take a look at the relationship between the cable industry and the documentary filmmaking community. The news of Discovery Communications’ proposed policy to eliminate end-roll credits from broadcasts of newly commissioned documentaries arrived in time for IDA President Michael Donaldson to