Allow me to introduce you to the new Executive Director of the International Documentary Association. She is a high-energy, creative, capable executive with miles of experience and tons of contacts. Her name is Sandra Ruch. Sandra worked for over a decade with PBS on the programming and promotion of Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery!. Her daily involvement with these programs allowed her to interact with filmmakers, producers, broadcasters and station programmers. She also helped produce Pride of Place, a 12-part documentary on American architecture for PBS. As President of Marketing for New
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To be the guest of a festival and watch one’s documentary on a screen is a dream and a privilege, but traveling to Durango Film Festival 2001 in Colorado became more of a nightmare. Caught in a snowstorm in Denver and re-routed to Farmington, New Mexico, and finally arrived at my destination some 14 hours after leaving LA. I immediately promised myself this would be the last festival I would attend—until it concluded some nine days later. Nearly 200 miles from the nearest interstate, at 6,500 feet in elevation, the town of Durango was a Shangri-La, a cultural melting pot of some 15,000 old
A review of 'Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America' by Randolph Lewis
Fall has arrived. The kids are back in school. And all good fans of the documentary art form have an opportunity to see some of the best documentaries of the year during IDA's fifth annual DOCtober™. DOCtober™ is a festival dedicated exclusively to documentary films. No fictional features need apply. About 15 films will be shown once a day for a week at the end of October. Both feature-length and short documentaries will be shown. During the first four DOCtobers™, 42 films qualified for Oscar® consideration. Of those, eight were nominated, and two won. You will not be disappointed. During the
Dear Readers, Welcome to nature, or the world of nature and wildlife documentaries, a genre that has seen a surge in popularity on the international distribution circuit over the past several years. This issue affords you a glimpse at the perspectives of programmers and practitioners alike. Barry Clark, one of the more respected authorities on nature filmmaking, offers his insights into the state of the genre—where it is now and where it can and ought to go. Michael Rose talks to executives at three of the leading programmers of natural history docs—National Geographic, Discovery Channel and
The Lacandon Jungle is located in the southeast of the State of Chiapas in Mexico. It was here, in 1994, that the EZLN, or Zapatista Army of National Liberation, launched a war—on land and on the Internet—against the government of the former PRI party that had ruled the country for more than 70 years. This movement has awakened the national conscience about the main problems of this country: extreme poverty and lack of opportunities for economic and social development, particularly among indigenous peoples. The corruption that grips this country like a cancer is in a great part responsible for
It was less than a year ago, in October 2000, when I last met with Erik Barnouw, and I treasure the image of his gracious intellect that I saw on that brilliant autumn day. On the common in Fair Haven, Vermont, in the home he shared with his wife Betty, Eric was relaxed, happy, aware, attentive and most importantly, full of information and enthusiasm for the project I brought to him. Betty, the vital pivot in the balance between Eric and the world in his later years was (and is) a supremely gifted woman. She somehow made everything work. We lunched heartily on a salad of her organic lettuces
This report comes happily from the Cannes International Film Festival. Nothing I have ever seen explains the place of the documentary in film history—and why we all are so involved in the art form—than Martin Scorsese’s marvelous, four-hour documentary, Il Mio Viaggio in Italia (My Voyage in Italy), a two-part history of Italian cinema. This report focuses on Part I, which provides the most detailed explanation of the nexus between documentaries and fictional features. Scorsese narrates the film himself. His set-up for the film explains the overall concept better than I ever could: “This is
Dear Readers, In concert with IDA’s much-anticipated summertime event, we look back on the making of one of the great rock’n’roll docs, D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, and how it has figured in Pennebaker’s illustrious career. We also go back in time, well before the 1960s, to the Roman Empire, the latest subject in Devillier Donegan Enterprises’ well-conceived strand series, Empires. Stephanie Mardesich profiles this and other episodes in this novel way of presenting and interpreting history. Once you’ve made your documentary, how do you get it seen? Well, we look into two areas—festivals
There is no question that Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, her 1936 masterpiece of the Berlin Olympic Games, is the main reason I became a documentary filmmaker. She was the original storyteller, introducing innovative techniques that we all try to emulate today. Even with modern technology, which brings intimate beauty and drama to today’s filming of sporting events, what producers claim to be innovative only have to view Olympia to realize that it all began almost 70 years ago with Riefenstahl’s Olympic epic. One would think that, with Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels as her bosses, Riefenstahl