Steven Spielberg is one of the world's most respected and successful filmmakers. He reached a professional peak in 1993-94 with Schindler's List, which won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. It also won every major Best Picture award and an exceptional number of additional honors. Also in 1993, he directed Jurassic Park which became the highest grossing film in the history of motion pictures. His list of successes as director or producer have encompassed eight of the top twenty grossing films of all time. The Color Purple in 1986 earned him his first Directors Guild
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Documentary began, of course, before television. Before radio, even. And its adoption by American commercial broadcast television has always had an uneven life, never quite expiring but frequently slipping into a vegetative state. Most recently, it's undergone a revival of sorts, as programs such as 60 Minutes and 48 Hours on CBS, Dateline NBC and ABC's 20/20 have succeeded with a kind of "documentary-for-people-with-short-attention spans," under the aegis of the respective network news departments. The situation for broadcasters is quite separate from the cable networks, where documentary
Forty years ago, a forum to examine Black culture in America would likely have presented films made by White American Producers. In fact, a clip of one such documentary from the 1950s, about Black sharecroppers in the American South, showed up in one of the featured films at the recent Urbanworld Film Festival. A subtitle in this patronizing documentary reads, "The public school term for negroes is only 90 days. Attendance is not obligatory and ignorance is inevitable." Since the '50s, the Black American experience has been chronicled by the media with aid and influence of Black scholars and
Does the world really need yet another film festival? Even one that has noble social and aesthetic purposes, along with strong community support? Even a very small one that provides a special service to the documentary world? At the International Documentary Association, the Board of Trustees and the Board of Directors, along with the staff, have been considering such questions over the past two years. Ultimately, we chose to take the step: go forward, on a trial basis, with an International Documentary Film Festival that is designed to put documentaries on a par with those fiction features
In the summer of 1994, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles announced the formation of Moriah Films "to undertake the production of films on major events and personalities in the 3,500 year Jewish experience." A major goal for the new production unit would be "to reach young people and the unaffiliated who do not belong to synagogues and have not been reached by the Jewish community." Although focusing on the Center's primary area of concern, the Holocaust, officials did not see the unit as being limited in scope to that subject alone; from time to time, Moriah would produce films that
... and now for a brief look back at the IDA summer of '97: The summer began with the first public screening of the long repressed documentary Nuremberg (1946) by Pare Lorentz. With the cooperation of Elizabeth Lorentz, the Lorentz Panel, the documentary archive at the AMPAS Library, the California Council on Humanities and the Museum of Tolerance, IDA attracted an over-capacity audience at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles on June 2nd. With such strong interest in the film, IDA is now planning future screenings in Los Angeles, Washington and New York. Shortly after that "first", IDA
After a harsh winter, the coming of spring in New York City this year occasioned a joyful grin, even from the most ill-tempered New Yorkers. This phenomenon occurred during the same week that an innovative film festival hit the city—the First New York City Sierra Club Film & Video Festival (May 29-June) featuring programming that explored hard-hitting environmental issues. The event brought welcome relief to a documentary scene which - at least in the opinion of this reviewer—has been in the midst of a bleak "winter": wherein the documentary form has been threatened with compromise by a
The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival—the only festival devoted exclusively to human rights issues—held its eighth annual event at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (co-presenter), in New York City, June 6-19. With screenings at the Walter Reade Theatre, fourteen of the twenty-one features were documentaries, culled from 600 titles submitted for the festival's consideration. In the screenings,13 foreign countries and the U.S. were represented; for many films, the director and other production personnel joined human rights specialists for Q&A sessions and panels afterward
Imagine this: You've spent the last three years of your life toiling nights and weekends on your pet project. Finally, after mortgaging your house and maxing out your credit cards, you've finished the piece you always wanted to produce. But instead of shopping it to HBO, or hoping P.O.V. might have a slot for it, you upload it to a documentary repository site hosted by an Internet Service Provider. With a little promotion and a bit of press, 500 people a day "stop by" to watch. Believe it or not? Believe it. The scenario described above isn't reality quite yet. But the ability of the World
At first glance, the Internet seems to be an impossibly complex jumble of vague electronic resources. For an on-line neophyte, the task of learning where-and how-to start sometimes seems overwhelming. The enormous hype surrounding the Internet, and in particular the World Wide Web, either leads an individual to a nagging feeling of "missing out, "or a deep suspicion that the grand frontier of the so-called "information super-highway" is pure hyperbole. The fact is, the Internet is a great tool - it's a wonderful opportunity to supplement your reach in a number of important areas. If you use