Latest Posts

The 16th Outfest: The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival celebrated its spiritely age with documentaries of all sizes, shapes and sensibilities. During a summer when the likes of Senator Trent Lott likened queerhood to kleptomania, and ex-gays and lesbians were proclaiming their miraculous convergence, Outfest '98 arrived as a much-needed antedote. All told, there were 48 short and long docs filling the screens of West Hollywood throughout the mid-summer fest, of which this writer viewed seventeen. Didn't Do It for Love, the latest from German filmmaker Monica Treut, profiles the wildly

In the past few years, reality-based programs such as Cops, Unsolved Mysteries, America's Most Wanted and others have garnered precious airtime and, in the process, contributed to a wider popularity of documentaries with general audiences. The programs are relatively inexpensive to produce and they get consistently good ratings. They look "newsy," sound and feel "so real." General audiences perhaps consider them as documentaries, part and parcel of a long tradition of truth-seeking imagemaking—but, are they? For sure, these programs contain many of the signals from the documentary approach

Each year since 1978, an international group of independent filmmakers, public television producers and commissioning editors have gathered together to exchange ideas and share work at the annual INPUT conference. Neither a festival, a television market nor a competition, INPUT convenes filmmakers and public television representatives whose common goal is to create "intelligent stories." Directors present and screen their work in a forum that encourages an honest exchange of ideas and opinions. As Enrique Nicanor, president of INPUT, stated in the 1997 call for entries, "We don't differentiate

Here we are, in the home stretch, heading for the Third International Documentary Congress in late October. If you haven't registered or made your travel plans, DO IT NOW! This is a Congress You Don't Want to Miss. The Steering and Panels committees and the IDC3 staff have worked throughout the summer preparing for what's destined to be the foremost gathering of nonfiction filmmakers, funders, program­mers and historians of the century. Read on. The Congress kicks off with a pre-conference special interest program for people wanting to get started in a documentary career. For the first time

When I first saw Ellen Bruno's film, Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy, at the National Educational Media Network's 1994 screenings (it was called the National Educational Film & Video Festival back then), that was it for me. At that moment, I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker. And not just any filmmaker, but an independent documentary filmmaker. I know, I know, my career choice didn't exactly spell $$$. But it was something about the films that found their way to this festival that grabbed me—films such as Something Within Me, a documentary about the artistic and personal triumphs of young

The Krakow 35th International Short Film Festival ran from May 29 to June 2, 1998; in the same theatre, at the same time, ran the 31st National Short Film Festival. Confusing? Not really: one is International; the other National. The site for the five days of screening was the Kijow Cinema, a technically sophisticated house equipped for several video formats and projection in all standard film formats. Excellent simultaneous translation was provided for the non-subtitled films, into English, French and Polish. Next to the theatre was The Hotel Cracovia, where a majority of the Festivals'

The opening night gala for this year's Human Rights Watch International Film Festival looked more like a Hollywood premiere than any prior festival. Limousines and photogra­phers lined up at Lincoln Center to record the attendance of Isabella Rosellini and Alan Pakula, as well as an internationally-flavored audience benefiting the only film festival in the world devoted exclusively to threats against political and individual freedom. This ninth year of the festival marked the fourth year since joining forces with the Film Society of Lincoln Center and moving uptown, both in spirit and in fact

This column has been used for the last few issues to brief IDA members and other readers of the magazine about IDC3, the Third International Documentary Congress, co-sponsored by IDA and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The gala confab will be held October 28 through 30, at the Beverly Hills headquarters of AMPAS. Why so much hype? Clearly, documentarians take a back seat to the groupiness of the theatrical types, whose festive premieres and PR puffiness splash o'er the pages of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter on a daily basis. Rarely do documentarians have the chance to mix

Women Make Movies (WMM) is a nonprofit media arts organization that facilitates the production, dissemination and exhibition of independent films by and about women. Founded in 1972, it established a solid nontheatrical distribution niche by the mid-1990s for many of its documentaries and shorts at colleges and universities, as well as with women's and health organizations. WMM also handles the theatrical distribution of a number of American and European independent features directed by women. The Home Video Experiment—Introduction Case Study #1: Fanlight Productions Case Study #2: California

The aftermath of the American Civil War was the backdrop for a mythic American movie character, Scarlett O'Hara, who found herself adrift amidst sweeping changes in her world too recent to comprehend fully. Her struggle to survive in a suddenly altered society has affected generations of moviegoers. Though the political issues are not the same, the recent drastic political and economic upheavals in Central and Eastern Europe have likewise made for remarkable human drama. Documentaries from Russia, Poland, Germany and elsewhere have been on the scene capturing the transition from communist to